Top 15 Jamelle Bouie Quotes

DeSean Jackson is still an NFL player, and—as a player for Washington, D.C.’s professional football team—will make a tremendous amount of money. He can keep his connections to his friends, he can live in the same neighborhood, if he wants, and downward mobility won’t be a pressing concern. For millions of more ordinary black Americans, however, the opposite is true. Even with more income and more education, they’re stuck in segregated neighborhoods. Yes, there isn’t much mobility for anyone, but that fact is especially true for blacks. Indeed, when someone says that America has a “,” this is what they mean: Whether times are good or bad, blacks remain at the bottom.

All of which raises an obvious question: Why do blacks have a hard time leaving impoverished neighborhoods? [...] Once you grasp the staggering differences between black and white neighborhoods, it becomes much easier to explain a whole realm of phenomena. Take the achievement gap between middle-class black students and their white peers. It’s easy to look at this and jump to cultural explanations—that this is a function of black culture and not income or wealth. But, when we say middle-class black kids are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods, what we’re also saying is that they’re less likely to have s with professionals, and more likely to be exposed to violence and crime. This can have serious consequences. Youthful experimentation for a white teenager in a suburb might be smoking a joint in a friend’s attic. Youthful experimentation for a black teenager might be hanging out with gang members.

[B]lack Americans live with a level of poverty that is simply unknown to the vast majority of whites. It’s tempting to attribute this to the income disparity between blacks and whites. Since blacks are more likely to be poor, it stands to reason that they’re more likely to live in poor neighborhoods. But the fact of large-scale neighborhood poverty holds true for higher-income black Americans as well. Middle-class blacks are far more likely than middle-class whites to live in areas with significant amounts of poverty. Among today’s cohort of middle- and upper-class blacks, about half were raised in neighborhoods of at least 20 percent poverty. Only 1 percent of today’s middle- and upper-class whites can say the same. In short, if you took two children—one white, one black—and gave them parents with similar jobs, similar educations, and similar values, the black child would be much more likely to grow up in a neighborhood with higher poverty, worse schools, and more violence. This is an outright disaster for income mobility. Given their circumstances, blacks face a reversal of their gains over the last generation. Simply put, the persistence of poor neighborhoods is a fact of life for the large majority of blacks; it’s been transmitted from one generation to the next, and shows little sign of changing.

The difference for ordinary black Americans, as opposed to NFL stars, is that this has been a powerful driver of downward mobility. Just a quick comparison of black and white neighborhoods is enough to illustrate the particular challenges that face black families as they reach for middle class, or try to keep their position. The key fact is this: Even after you adjust for income and education, black Americans are more likely than any other group to live in neighborhoods with substantial pockets of poverty.

[L]eaving home is hard, and the of wealth makes it even harder.

Making the city less car dependent is making the city less expensive for people.

there is no national drive, no national politician saying the United States needs to construct much more housing than it does. And I think it has everything to do with how the party coalitions right now are what their nature is.

I think nationally, we have the Republican Party, which sort of doesn’t really believe it can win without changing the rules and, like, kicking people out the electorate. And then in cities like New York and the state of California, you have a party that does not think it can lose. And so that creates its own set of dysfunctions.

Big, massive relief bill was passed, $1.9-trillion, by the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress, and then the Republicans in Congress are going on about Dr. Seuss or whatever...I think the right response is just not even to engage it. To say, “You guys can talk about that if you want, but here are actual problems that we’re trying to solve.”

becoming someone whose primary mode of getting around here is on a bicycle has sort of, like, made me much more aggressively, you know, pro-density, anti-cars, anti-parking. Because it just becomes like a waste. You see it as like the waste of space that it is.

I occasionally tweet very vociferously about land-use decisions in this city. And a lot of that’s inspired just by actually seeing, like, 70 percent, 80 percent of lots in the city. Like, I’ve actually seen much of the built environment of Charlottesville just from biking around.

if you could get 10 percent of people doing their daily life on a bike,that clears up roads, that kind of makes it easier for everyone else who does rely on cars and does rely on motorized transportation to get around.

I just became super attuned to how much space cars take up in a way that I just don’t think people appreciate. It’s very easy to say we need more parking in a place, but there’s not that much conversation of, like, what you’re giving up when you do that. And I think being a biker or pedestrian helps you see what actually you’re giving up by prioritizing car infrastructure.

the price of equality, or at least of the promise of an equal society, is vigilance against those who would make government the tool of hierarchy. And, in turn, we must recognize that this struggle-to secure democracy against privilege on the one hand, and to secure privilege against democracy on the other-is the unresolvable conflict of American life. It is the push and pull that will last for as long as the republic stands.

Republicans stepped onto this path after America elected its first Black president, and they thereafter embraced a racist demagogue and his attacks on the legitimacy of the nation's multiracial character; these actions speak to how the threads of history tie past and present together.