Their chances of escaping from the underclass, from the vicious cycle of poverty, were no better than those of their similarly alienated black neighbors and probably worse for those who didn’t speak English

Given the number of negative experiences I've had in the past few years, I can't imagine what a Black guy goes through.

After Katrina, trying to get back to the city was awful for Black people and we still haven’t fully recovered.

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.

To be confronted with the way in which black men had to live their lives. In those terrible cramped quarters, often with families illegally there. Those single-quarter hostels. They were terrible places. Just terrible. It was the 1960s, these were men who worked in factories, at the harbour, on the docks

We do not even inquire whether a black man is a rebel in arms, or not, if he is black, be he friend or foe, he is thought best kept at a distance. It is hardly possible God will let us succeed while such enormities are practiced.

We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African- Americans, Hispanics are living in hell because it's so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot.

[If he feels disconnected from black millenials]: I've met people like him before and have had confrontations with people like him before, not many. A klansman hates a white person who 'sells out', so to speak, more so than they hate a black person. Just like the young boy hated me more than he hated some white guy, because he felt that I've sold out my own race. He was very definate that white people could not change. How is he going to advance any agenda in this country, as diverse as it is?

The man who backbites an absent friend, nay, who does not stand up for him when another blames him, the man who angles for bursts of laughter and for the repute of a wit, who can invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a secret — that man is black at heart: mark and avoid him.

The black is a black man;that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated.

No matter how much money you have, no matter how famous you are, no matter how many people admire you, being black in America is tough.

When you are Black, it comes with disadvantages, because you need to really prove yourself.

Had to be here to understand,” he had said. He’d meant here in Chicago; but he could also have meant here in my shoes, an older black man who still burns from a lifetime of insults, of foiled ambitions, of ambitions abandoned before they’ve been tried. I asked myself if I could truly understand that. I assumed, took for granted, that I could. Seeing me, these men had made the same assumption.

Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be rightly felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the sense of unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else, and never had existed before, except in volcanic craters; the violent contrast between this dense, smoky, impenetrable darkness, and the soft green charm that one glided into, as one emerged — the revelation of an unknown society of the pit — made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill. The Black District was a practical education, but it was infinitely far in the distance. The boy ran away from it, as he ran away from everything he disliked.