A Quote by Michelle Alexander

The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress.
In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.
Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination... Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the black middle class.
The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to satisfy a pretty basic - and urgent - level of need. Yet people in the upper middle class - with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries, retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs - have journeyed so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about our politicians and their policies.
You can't make a direct comparison between middle-class African Americans and middle-class white Americans, affluent African Americans and affluent white Americans. The amount of wealth tends to be less.
Policing was developed, created, and implemented for the elite, and - in the case of the United States - the elites were and almost entirely remain white, upper middle class, cisgender straight men.
There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.
We're going to have to invest in the American people again, in tax cuts for the middle class, in health care for all Americans, and college for every young person who wants to go. In businesses that can create the new energy economy of the future. In policies that will lift wages and will grow our middle class. These are the policies I have fought for my entire career.
I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.
The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
It's strange because we think of the upper middle class, for example, as being secular, that they've fallen away from religion. Well, it turns out that the upper middle class goes to church more often and feels a much stronger affiliation with their religion than the white working class.
I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.
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.
Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.
Before Obamacare, many working class Americans had an upper middle class healthcare benefit that they got at work.
Mr. Cosby wanted to do a show not about an upper-middle-class black family, but an upper-middle-class family that happened to be black. Though it sounds like semantics, they're very different approaches.
One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.
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