A Quote by Shelby Steele

I am a middle-class black, a college professor, far from wealthy, but also well removed from the kind of deprivation that would qualify my children for the label 'disadvantaged.'
For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.
The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.
My composition often goes toward the black middle class or the black super-wealthy or strong historical black figures.
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
Betty Sutton and I will make it a point to put state government back on the side of the middle class, not the wealthy and well-connected who have run the show at the statehouse for far too long.
We will lower the tax burden on middle class Americans by asking the very wealthy to pay their fair share. Middle class taxpayers will have a choice between a children's tax credit or a significant reduction in their income tax rate.
Actually we've had a black bourgeoisie or the makings of a black bourgeoisie for many more decades.In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the US has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable. What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.
In college I took a class from a professor who changed my whole life. I can't really remember what his name was, or what the class was, or even which college it was, but I found that if you sit behind a really tall guy and kind of slouch down in your chair you can drink Scotch right from the bottle and not get caught.
The answers to feeding hungry children is not fewer dollars to feed hungry children, it's to do more. It is to raise the minimum wage. It is to increase, not dismantle, the earned income tax credit. It is to make college more affordable for more middle class families, not more expensive. These are the things that grow our middle class.
I came from a middle-class family. My father was a professor in a medical college, and my mother was a schoolteacher. We led a good life but we did not have much money.
There's a very big gulf between the black civil rights leadership in America and the black middle class in America. The black middle class are conservative. Many of those minorities can be persuaded to be members of the Republican Party.
There is still an assumption among many people that to be black is to be lower class. In the last fifteen to twenty years, perhaps even further back than that, there's also been an explosion of a very wealthy black class in the United States, but those people are often treated as special cases: they're athletes, entertainers. Jay-Z. Basketball players. The country metabolizes the fact these rich black people exist, but it seems only to reinforce the idea that every other black person is limping along in poverty.
I am but a generation removed from poverty and despair. Where would I be today if there had never been an America? What kind of lives or future would my children have if this was not a land of opportunity?
Wes Clark put forward a middle-class tax plan, but it only helps a quarter of middle-class families, none without minor children at home. And mine helps 98 percent of the middle class.
Growing our economy means allowing individuals, and particularly those in the middle class, to be able to keep more of their money. It also means that people in the middle class and modest incomes to be able to pay for their retirement, to get a down payment for a home, to send a child to college.
The liberal wing of the feminist movement may have improved the lives of its middle- and upper-class constituency--indeed, 1992 was the Year of the White Middle Class Woman--but since the leadership of this faction of the feminist movement has singled out black men as the meta-enemy of women, these women represent one of the most serious threats to black male well-being since the Klan.
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