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Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

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Lailah Gifty Akita

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“Dear Pavement, The sun used to be the only thing to warm you, and now it’s body heat—a mingling recipe of human flesh and cockroach, of human flesh and rodent, of human flesh and tossed quarters. A cheek rests on you, a cheek capable of being kissed by a bishop, a cheek once held in a mother’s palm, a cheek that deserves more than the prickly pebbled pillow you are.”

PovertyMoralityHumanitarianHomelessnessThe Goodbye SongHomeless People
Book:The Goodbye Song
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“These remarks reflect the expansive reach of the discourse on law and order, which since the 1970s tended to conflate "crime" with civil rights protests in the South and with the widespread turmoil generated by racism in the North. The moral panic produced by this discourse increasingly meant that the "law and order" slogan served as a proxy for more explicit calls to suppress Black movements and ultimately also to criminalize indiscriminately broad swaths of the Black population. By 1994, the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, produced by global economic shifts, was having a deleterious impact on working-class Black communities. The massive loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector, especially in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, had the result, according to Joe William Trotter, that "the black urban working class nearly disappeared by the early 1990s." Combined with the disestablishment of welfare state benefits, these economic shifts caused vast numbers of Black people to seek other—sometimes "illegal"—means of survival. It is not accidental that the full force of the crack epidemic was felt during the 1980s and early '90s. During this period there were few signs of governmental effort to address the circumstances responsible for the rapid impoverishment of working-class Black communities, and the 1994 Crime Bill was emblematic of the turn to carceral "solutions" as a response to the impact of forces of global capitalism. As Cedric Robinson has pointed out, capitalism has always been racial capitalism, and the Crime Bill was a formidable indication that Republicans and Democrats in Washington were united in their acceptance of punitive strategies to stave off the effects of Black impoverishment.”

LawPovertyCrimeAfrican AmericansBlacksIncarceration
Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
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“I am tired of the lifeless tears. I’ve cried so many bitter tears of yesterday because tomorrow has never come. I am immune to salty tears as I drown in an ocean of tears over and over again. When will I be able to come up for air? Sadly, life dunks my head underwater again as I cry while tears are buried beneath my sheets at night.”

InspirationalPoetryFriendshipPovertySelf EsteemYoung AdultAdoptionHomelessnessMental Health AwarenessFoster Children
Book:Pinwheels and Dandelions
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“I noticed regardless if they are surrounded by weeds, they still grow, and they are so colorful because there isn’t anyone to intervene with the process of Mother Nature. They know what to do. It comes naturally. I think everything should happen naturally, but that is impossible because humans are good at interfering with the natural process of life. They fuck it up, and that is why things are so complicated. They think they know what is best, but in reality, they are just in the way. They make things worse than they should be. If human beings just let nature take its course, I believe we would have more happy people in the world ... as opposed to people who suffer by the hands and actions of someone who has fucked up their life. Then they have to figure it out alone—regardless of age.”

InspirationalPoetryFriendshipPovertySelf EsteemYoung AdultAdoptionHomelessnessMental Health AwarenessFoster Children
Book:Pinwheels and Dandelions
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