Ghetto Quotes

“Dwelling among shipwrecked dreams and losing oneself in wishful thinking cannot be a solution to tribulations. Identifying cracks and apprehending the defaults in one's life is essential to find a way to get out of a ghetto and to start a search for a new haven. ("The world was somewhere else" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Who is left in the ghetto is the one man in a thousand in any age, in any culture, who through some mysterious workings of force within his soul will stand in defiance against any master. He is that one human in a thousand whose indomitable spirit will not bow. He is the one man in a thousand whose indomitable spirit cannot bow. He is the one man in a thousand who will not walk quietly to Umschlagplatz. Watch out for him, Alfred Funk, we have pushed him to the wall.”
― Leon Uris, Mila 18

“This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up.”
― Jerry Spinelli

“The hood is also a low-stress, comfortable life. All your mental energy goes into getting by, so you don’t have to ask yourself any of the big questions. Who am I? Who am I supposed to be? Am I doing enough? In the hood you can be a forty-year-old man living in your mom’s house asking people for money and it’s not looked down on. You never feel like a failure in the hood, because someone’s always worse off than you, and you don’t feel like you need to do more, because the biggest success isn’t that much higher than you, either. It allows you to exist in a state of suspended animation.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

“Today a great shot for freedom was heard. I think it stands a chance of being heard forever. It marls a turning point in the history of the Jewish people. The beginning of the return to a statues of dignity we have not known for two thousand years. Yes, today was the first step back. My battle is done. Now I turn the command over to the soldiers. ”
― Leon Uris

“I mean, it's one thing to wanna do something. It's another to think it's possible. Rapping has been my dream forever, but dreams aren't real. You wake up from them or reality makes them seem stupid. Trust, every time my fridge is almost empty, all of my dreams seem stupid.”
― Angie Thomas, On the Come Up

“I don't like the way people cherish the ghetto, as if it’s some royal palace, or kingdom. I also don't like the way people treat each other in the ghetto. It is really hard to find love, trust, and respect. You don't find too many people that want to do better for themselves in the ghetto because so many people seem to be satisfied with where they're at.”
― Delano Johnson, Words That Changed the World

“The hood was strangely comforting, but comfort can be dangerous. Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

“He was a drug dealer.” It hurts to say that. “And possibly a gang member.”

“Why was he a drug dealer? Why are so many people in our neighborhood drug dealers?”

I remember what Khalil said—he got tired of choosing between lights and food. “They need money,” I say. “And they don’t have a lot of other ways to get it."

"Right. Lack of opportunities," Daddy says. "Corporate America don't bring jobs to our communities, and they damn sure ain't quick to hire us. Then, shit, even if you do have a high school diploma, so many of the schools in our neighborhoods don't prepare us well enough.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“It is not believed that a people capable of inventing the genre of "oral painting" could have spawned the viaduct killer, and in any case no ghetto resident is permitted access to any other area of the city. ("A Short Guide To The City")”
― Peter Straub, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“The tricky thing about the hood is that you’re always working, working, working, and you feel like something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

“Unless a theologian has the inner fortitude of a desert saint, he has only one effective remedy against the threat of cognitive collapse in the face of these pressures: he must huddle together with like-minded fellow deviants⁠—and huddle very closely indeed. Only in a countercommunity of considerable strength does cognitive deviance have a chance to maintain itself. The countercommunity provides continuing therapy against the creeping doubt as to whether, after all, one may not be wrong and the majority right. To fulfill its functions of providing social support for the deviant body of "knowledge," the countercommunity must provide a strong sense of solidarity among its members (a "fellowship of the saints" in a world rampant with devils) and it must be quite closed vis-à-vis the outside ("Be not yoked together with unbelievers"); in sum, it must be a kind of ghetto.”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

“In these cases, the police figure prominently in the incidents that triggered the rioting. Sometimes they are not directly involved, but rumors of police brutality flood through the ghetto. Although it may be of some interest to search for a pattern, no very profound purpose is served by concentrating on who struck the match. There are always matches lying around. We must ask why there was also a fuse and why the fuse was connected to a powder keg.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“Movement is key to dissipating negativity in community relations. Typically, dominant powers will attempt to ghettoize their opponents during periods of open conflict, in an attempt to better monitor and control them. We have found that these are the ideal conditions for the intensification of malignancy in conflict; hostilities are more likely to fester and grow when groups are constrained in one location. This is exactly what occurred during the independence struggle in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, when the French limited the movement of non-French Algerians to the Kasbah. This constraint led to the festering of resentments and the organization of insurgents. Alternatively, systems where negativity is relatively unconstrained, and where members of groups are allowed to travel and disperse, will tend to show a dissipation of negativity over time. This is a counterintuitive finding with substantial implications for policy and practice.”
― Peter T. Coleman, The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts

“During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity."

Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“Pathological people made the pathological ghetto, segregationists say. The pathological ghetto made pathological people, assimilationists say. To be antiracist is to say the political and economic conditions, not the people, in poor Black neighborhoods are pathological. Pathological conditions are making the residents sicker and poorer while they strive to survive and thrive, while they invent and reinvent cultures and behaviors that may be different but never inferior to those of residents in richer neighborhoods. But if the elite race-classes are judging the poor race-classes by their own cultural and behavioral norms, then the poor race-classes appear inferior. Whoever creates the norm creates the hierarchy and positions their own race-class at the top of the hierarchy.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“If you want to uplift and change your community.
If you want to uplift and change your hood, ghetto or township.
Change their stereotype.
Our society is held back , not to progress or developing , because of type of stereotypes we have within our community. If we break those stereotypes. We would find our freedom, happiness , progress and success.”
― De philosopher DJ Kyos

“I don't think the drug dealer in ghetto culture is really admired just because of the shit he owns. He isn't respected for his money, either. Think about it—there are plenty of people with money who aren't respected in ghettos all over the world. No, he's respected because he's capable. For those who feel broken and helpless, there does not exist a more inspiring thing.”
― Mike Hawthorne, Happiness Will Follow

“Our cities have constructed elaborate expressways and elevated skyways, and white Americans speed from suburb to inner city through vast pockets of black deprivation without ever getting a glimpse of the suffering and misery in their midst.

But while so many white Americans are unaware of conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside. Their television sets bombard them day by day with the opulence of the larger society. From behind the ghetto walls they see glistening towers of glass and steel springing up almost overnight. They hear jet liners speeding over their heads at six hundred miles an hour. They hear of satellites streaking through outer space and revealing details of the moon.

Then they begin to think of their own conditions. They know that they are always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do. They look at these impressive buildings under construction and realize that almost certainly they cannot get those well-paying construction jobs, because building trade unions reserve them for whites only. They know that people who built the bridges, the mansions and docks of the South could build modern buildings if they were only given a chance for apprenticeship training. They realize that it is hard, raw discrimination that shuts them out. It is not only poverty that torments the Negro; it is the fact of poverty amid plenty. It is a misery generated by the gulf between the affluence he sees in the mass media and the deprivation he experiences in his everyday life.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“I went home later that night, thinking about everything. I wanted revenge for my cousin, but what did I know about revenge?”
― Russell Vann, Ghetto Bastard: A Memoir

“La rue fait de chaque journée une suite de questions piège, et chaque réponse incorrecte peut provoquer une raclée, une balle dans la peau, une grossesse non désirée. Personne n'en sort indemne. Pourtant, la chaleur qui s dégage de ce danger permanent, de ce flirt constant avec la mort, est excitante.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“We have torn down the worst slums. The natural meeting-points for the lumpenproletariat have been eliminated, converted into pleasant, dull, clean blocks for dull, clean, adapted families. In the absence of ghettos for the losers, they gather around the centres of pride. If Harlem and its equivalents did not exist, they would gather outside the Rockefeller Center.”
― Nils Christie, Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

“Ideology is a ghetto where reason goes to die”
― Dean Cavanagh

“Pour qui est né après la seconde guerre mondiale, ces événements vieux d'un demi-siècle sont comme des histoires de loups-garous. Cependant le message par lequel s'achève le compte-rendu de ces événements, et qui ne devait être que symbolique, est devenu d'actualité. (postface, 1993)”
― Marek Edelman, Mémoire du ghetto de Varsovie

“Cruising down Compton Boulevard in the Catalina, Mickey sensed the charged atmosphere of the place, an energy that said anything could happen. Young men loitered in groups on the sidewalks in baggy T-shirts and bandannas while young women strolled up and down, smirking at the men hollering after them and whistling. When traffic lights turned red, blank-faced children appeared out of the darkness under overpasses like wraiths to sell drugs to drivers. Prostitutes wobbled along the streets on high heels, many of them with the vacant gaze of the addicted, while men with hard hearts and a lust for blood watched their every move. All the while well-intentioned families who called Compton home got ground up in the giant machine of this nation, slipping further toward poverty and the tragic moment when pressing need overtakes good intentions.

Even still, Compton was no longer what it once was. Ten years ago, Mickey might not have driven through it, and certainly wouldn’t have stopped and wandered around. But the homicide rate had decreased steadily since ’94, down to forty-eight murders in ’98 from a peak of eighty-seven in ’91, and small businesses were slowly but surely returning to the city. It bothered Mickey deeply that the state of California, with an economy greater than that of most countries, wouldn’t help these people, or that the federal government of the United States, the richest country in the history of the world, wouldn’t help them either, instead spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year on warfare and destruction. The people of Compton could be lifted from poverty with the signing of a bill, and it was no wonder, when you got right down to it, why so many had resorted to crime.”
― Philip Elliott, Porno Valley

“A child of the ghetto, nobody explain it to me, Livin the scripture the picture they painted for me.”
― 50 Cent

“I was raised in what is now the "jungle" of New York, the lower Bronx, and, indeed, at that time it was a very pleasant place. We played like all other kids. Where I lived was a very small enclave, a ghetto, but there were a number of ghettos. Most of the people there were immigrants; first generation Americans from Italy, Ireland, Poland, and there were a few French people. In a way, in a peculiar way, it was an integrated community composed of several separated ghettos. That was about the norm in those days. The idea of integration hadn't really gotten started, so I think that for anyone living today it would be a period that would be really difficult to understand...it was...in spite of some of the racism which I began to learn in school, a rather pleasant life.”
― Oliver W. Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Essays

“It's the freaking American way--you start out in a dangerous craphole and work hard so you can someday move up to a somewhat less dangerous craphole. And finally maybe you get a mansion.”
― George Saunders, Pastoralia

“the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings