Many unhoused people work full time but earn starvation, unlivable wages. Some struggle to access mental health services or substance use treatment, making earning a consistent and stable wage nearly impossible.
Cori BushRead
We have a deeply rooted misconception in our country that unhoused people have done something to deserve their conditions - when the reality is that unhoused people are living the consequences of our government's failure to secure the basic necessities people need to survive.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the misconception that homelessness is a result of personal failure rather than systemic issues.
Cori Bush's quote addresses the stigma surrounding homelessness, emphasizing that society often blames unhoused individuals for their plight instead of recognizing the role of systemic failures, particularly by government institutions, in providing essential resources. It calls attention to the need for a societal shift in understanding homelessness not as a personal failing but as a consequence of broader socio-economic and political issues.
Themes
HomelessnessSystemic IssuesSocietyGovernmentMisconceptions
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech advocating for policy changes to help the unhoused population.
More from Cori Bush
All quotes →The death penalty is an inhumane punishment that disproportionately violates the human rights of Black, brown, indigenous, and other marginalized people.
Cori BushRead
By expanding the legal authority of law enforcement agencies - without addressing the infiltration of white supremacy within law enforcement - we are expanding the capacity of white supremacy itself.
Cori BushRead
We don't live in a world that nurtures and cares for Black girls like me. And if the world doesn't care about a Black girl like me, then what will happen to our Black babies who grow up to become Black children and Black adults?
Cori BushRead
This stereotype that Black and brown boys and girls are dangerous or threatening has normalized systems of trauma: the cradle to prison pipeline, foster care, youth detention, and being tried and sentenced as adults. We treat trauma with more trauma.
Cori BushRead
Being unhoused in America must no longer be viewed as an individual shortcoming, but rather as an unacceptable, life-threatening policy failure.
Cori BushRead
Similar quotes
There are vivid memories from my childhood - what we had to go through because of low wages and the conditions, basically because there was no union. I suppose, if I wanted to be fair, I could say that I'm trying to settle a personal score. I could dramatize it by saying that I want to bring social justice to farm workers.
Cesar ChavezRead
Drugs is a government game, Bilal. A way to rob us of our best black men, our army. Everyone who plays the game loses. Then they get you right back where we started, in slavery! Then they get to say "This time you did it to yourself." I won't play that game.
Sister SouljahRead
'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.
Michelle AlexanderRead
What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.
Angela DavisRead
In the racialized space of capitalist gentrification, police are not only arbiters of the peace, they are the muscle of retail racism: You can only be in this space if you transcend your blackness by showing us some green dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that green will transcend your black skin.
Anthea ButlerRead