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The Essential Kerner Commission Report

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Jelani Cobb

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“I would never accept a world where Hank might be told: “I’m sorry, but while your cancer has a 92% cure rate when treated properly, there just aren’t adequate resources in the world to make that treatment available to you.” That world would be so obviously and unacceptably unjust. So how can I live in a world where Henry and his family are told that? How can I accept a world where over a million people will die this year for want of a cure that has existed for nearly a century?”

InjusticeInequalityTuberculosisGlobal Health
Author:John Green
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“Post-apocalyptic world will never unfold like in the movies, the post-apocalyptic world already exists, may be not for you, as you're born on the lucky side of privilege - but that world of drought, flood, famine, plague and persecution already exists - ten steps from the door of the privileged.”

Social JusticeInequalityOccupationGenocideTotalitarianismFamineDisparityHuman Rights ViolationDisplacementGlobal Goals
Book:Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience
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“The perspiration of kings is just froth of the decanter. But the pawis of peasants dries up, becomes lead that weighs them down the ages. The master wears a necktie; the slave, a grindstone. Between them no relationship is possible except that which exists between mill and grist. And what is private property without public toil? Yet the world perpetuates only the pyramids, only their pharaohs. Nobody remembers or even likes to admit that both came into existence only through brawn and blood that issued from millions upon millions of nameless serfs. You weep over sunken armadas but not over their galleon slaves. You weep over fallen crowns, not for those beheaded. This must stop! We shall stop you! Labor has a face, labor has a name! You don’t romanticize it. . . you feed its belly . . . heal its sores and sons. All written history glorifies the power of men, not the sweat of man. . . . All this feudal nonsense about lilac-strewn palaces and Cleopatra’s bath! Well, the new chronicle will smell as the tao smells. It shall be carpenter over architect, farmer over agrarianist, citizen over president....”

HistoryLaborPropertyOppressionInequalityExploitationPeasantsClass StruggleSlavesFeudalism
Book:But for the Lovers
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“What seem to be vestiges of the Jim Crow world in a sense are just that. But passage of the old order's segregationist trappings throws into relief the deeper reality that what appeared and was experienced as racial hierarchy was also class hierarchy. Now blacks occupy positions in the socioeconomic order previously available only to whites, and whites occupy those previously identified with blacks. And the dynamics of superordination and subordination, patterns of appropriation and distribution, and dominant understandings of which material interests should drive policy remain much as they were. This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology. Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests. At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it. That is the source of that bizarre sensation I felt in the region a generation after the defeat of Jim Crow. The larger takeaway from this reality is that a simple racism/anti-racism framework isn't adequate for making sense of the segregation era, and it certainly isn't up to the task of interpreting what has succeeded it or challenging the forms of inequality and injustice that persist.”

RacismInequalityIntegrationSocial ChangeSegregationHierarchyJim CrowAntiracism
Book:The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
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“This season is a leveler. The 'shege' is right in your breast pocket. I know families in this country (Nigeria) who have no access to justice, simply because they cannot afford the bills. This is a grim form of inequality we have not had enough conversation about. The scarcity of money is threatening both law and society. The affluent wax stronger, but the rest of us…Jack London calls The People of the Abyss.”

EconomicsInjusticeInequalityAfricaNigeriaAccess To Justice
Author:Peter-Cole C. Onele
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“We cannot separate forgiveness and social inequality in trauma recovery as forgiveness, trauma, and recovery always occur in a social and political context – one that is fraught with inequality.”

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Book:You Don't Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms
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