“In attitude towards poverty, there is a considerable double standard. America more or less expects the Negro to be poor (and is convinced that things are getting better, a point to be dealt with in a later chapter). There is no emotional shock when people hear of the experience of these human beings in Chicago. The mind and the feelings, even of good-willed individuals, are so suffused with an unconscious racism that misery is overlooked.”

— Michael Harrington , book The Other America

Source: The Other America (1962), Ch. 2

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In attitude towards poverty, there is a considerable double standard. America more or less expects the Negro to be poor…" by Michael Harrington?

Michael Harrington 17

American political writer 1928–1989

Related quotes

“Human beings cannot grow without feeling gratitude. Gratitude towards things is an attitude which fosters growth.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

29
Ki Sayings (2003)

“…there should be an absolute identification between the individual's experience and the writer's so that [experience] serves as the starting point for being able to write a short story or a novel later on…”

Rosario Ferré (1938–2016) Puerto Rican writer

On not wanting to be deemed a woman author (as quoted in “ROSARIO FERRE: THE VANGUARD OF PUERTO RICAN FEMINIST LITERATURE” http://smjegupr.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/19.-Rosario-Ferr---The-Vanguard-of-Puerto-Rican-Feminist-Literature-por-Suzanne-S.-Hintz.pdf)

“She thought of the multitude.
Trillions of human beings, wrappend like a fog about their home star. The mind collapsed at the scale and the numbers. But if ethics meant anything at all, it meant not letting the largeness of the human population overwhelm our moral knowledge that life is lived individually, and that even when agglomerated into billions and trillions individual human beings deserve better han being used as tools. That the overwhelming majority of this vast mass of humanity was poor, living precariously and subsistence lives in leaky shanty bubbles, eating ghunk and drinking recycled water—this made this more, not less, true. These were the people least able to help themselves. Thery should be helped, not exploited.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 13, “Of Multitudes” (p. 239).
Jack Glass (2012)

“If, as is quite possible, America refuses to deal with the social evils that persist in the sixties, it will at the same time have turned its back on the racial minorities. There will be speeches on equality; there will be gains as the nation moves toward a constitutional definition of itself as egalitarian. The Negro will watch all this from a world of double poverty. He will continue to know himself as a member of a race-class condemned by heredity to be poor.”

Michael Harrington book The Other America

Source: The Other America (1962), p.81

“I don’t think sexism is worse than racism, it’s impossible even to compare…It’s that I feel lonely in my fight against sexism, in a way that I don’t feel in my fight against racism. My friends, my family, they get racism, they get it. The people I’m close to who are not black get it. But I find that with sexism you are constantly having to explain, justify, convince, make a case for.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977) Nigerian writer

On why sexism is at times a more difficult argument for her than racism in “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘This could be the beginning of a revolution’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/28/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-feminism-racism-sexism-gender-metoo in The Guardian (2018 Apr 28)

“Even when we lose an arm or a leg, there's not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Source: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.