A Quote by Barack Obama

There is a certain percentage of the white population ... if they started having more middle-class black kids who are friends with their kids, eating Cheerios in their kitchen, their attitudes start changing.
When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school.
I have black friends, but I don't just hang out with black kids. I might pull up with Indian kids, white kids, black kids, whatever.
I realize that I'm black, but I like to be viewed as a person, and that's everybody's wish... I try to be a role model for black kids, white kids, yellow kids, green kids. This is what I felt was good about my personality.
Middle-class kids get to play, develop their thinking ability. Poor kids are much more likely to get regimentation under the guise of socialization. On top of it, we have huge segregation in early childhood programs. I don't see these patterns changing anytime soon, and that's a big obstacle.
But when you talk about the education and you talk about the lack of recreation for kids to do, I mean, it's second to none in New Orleans when you talk about the lack of opportunities for young people. And it's not just black kids, it's white kids. It's Asian kids. I had Vietnamese kids in my class that had lack of opportunities.
Actually, my friendships are changing because my friends have kids, so that's a new aspect to the material. Not just that I don't want to have kids, it's that I'm having a hard time relating to people I know.
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.
I know black kids who don't even know any other black kids except their cousins. And that's enough. You wouldn't look at these kids and say that they are Uncle Toms or self-hating or fleeing or trying to be white, given the culture in which they live, which is very natural to them as kids.
I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.
The black kids, the poor white kids, Spanish-speaking kids, and Asian kids in the US - in the face of everything to the contrary, they still bop and bump, shout and go to school somehow. Their optimism gives me hope.
I don't see anything wrong with a neighborhood association wanting to keep their neighborhood a certain way or their apartment complex a certain way. I don't see anything wrong with white kids wanting to go to school with white children, or black kids wanting to go to school with black kids.
It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.
I mean, I grew up in the Valley. All my friends were white Jewish kids. So the Latino kids thought I was this white girl.
I wish we could do a better job of understanding what we're doing to kids, because it can be better. It's unfair to give up on these young black kids. We don't do that to white kids.
We separated like oil and water. In the cafeteria, you'd see a table of black jocks, table of white jocks, table of rich white kids, table of Hispanic kids, table of Chinese kids, table of druggies, table of chatterboxes, and so on. Wait! There's a diverse table over there! With a few kids of different tenacities and economic status! Oh, that's the nerds. That's where I sat. We weren't cool enough for the other tables, so we didn't discriminate against anybody.
In college, I didn't know whether to hang out with the black kids or the white kids, and then I found the theatre kids, and I was like, 'Oh, it doesn't matter.' We were all weird and listening to Morrissey and wearing Doc Martens so that was my tribe.
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