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Quote by Michael Bloomberg

“I think [Winston] Churchill said it was " [democracy] the worst of all systems except for all the others." And that's probably true. It's never gone easily.”

Quote by Michael Bloomberg

Author

Michael Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg, born on February 14, 1942, is an American politician and businessman. He served as the Mayor of New York City, where he focused on improving city infrastructure, promoting economic development, and enhancing the quality of life for citizens. In the business world, Bloomberg has also made significant achievements, having founded and led Bloomberg L.P., one of the world's largest financial information companies. more

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“If you want to get at African American poverty, the income gap, wealth gap, achievement gap, that the most important thing is to make sure that the society as a whole does right by people who are poor, are working class, are aspiring to a better life for their kids.”

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Author:Barack Obama

“Higher minimum wages, full-employment programs, early-childhood education: Those kinds of programs are, by design, universal, but by definition, because they are helping folks who are in the worst economic situations, are most likely to disproportionately impact and benefit African Americans. They also have the benefit of being sellable to a majority of the body politic.”

“This is where I think policies do need to be somewhat race-specific, is making sure that institutions are not discriminatory. So you've got something like the FHA [Federal Housing Administration], which was on its face a universal program that involved a huge mechanism for wealth accumulation and people entering into the middle class.”

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Author:Barack Obama

“If, in [Federal Housing Administration] application, black folks were excluded from it, then you have to override that by going after those discriminatory practices.”

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Author:Barack Obama

“The same would be true for something like Social Security, where historically, if you just read the law and the fact that it excluded domestic workers or agricultural workers, you might not see race in it, unless you knew that that covered a huge chunk of African Americans, particularly in the South.”

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Author:Barack Obama

“Reinvigorating the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, making sure that in our Department of Education, where we see evidence of black boys being suspended at substantially higher rates than white boys for the same behavior, in the absence of that kind of rigorous enforcement of the nondiscrimination principle, then the long-standing biases that I believe have weakened, but are still clearly present in our society, assert themselves in ways that usually disadvantage African Americans.”

“How do we in the African American community build a culture in which we are saying to our kids, "Here's what it takes to succeed. Here's the sacrifices you need to make to be able to get ahead. Here's how we support each other. Here's how we look out for each other."”

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Author:Barack Obama

“It is my view that if society was doing the right thing with respect to you, [and there were] programs targeted at helping people rise into the middle class and have a good income and be able to save and send their kids to school, and you've got a vigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, then I have confidence in the black community's capabilities to then move forward.”

“Does that mean that all vestiges of past discrimination would be eliminated, that the income gap or the wealth gap or the education gap [between Afro-Americans and white] would be erased in five years or 10 years? Probably not, and so this is obviously a discussion we've had before when you talk about something like reparations.”

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Author:Barack Obama

“Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it's not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument.”