Carolina QuotesWhy do we hear so much about crime rates and opioids and gun violence in America, but poverty kills more people than all of those things?
William Barber II Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Quoted in Poverty 4th Leading Cause of Death in U.S. as Calls Grow for Third Reconstruction: Bishop Barber. Democracy Now! June 28, 2023.
- year
- 2023
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“Why do we hear so much about crime rates and opioids and gun…” William Barber II. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E54AF417AF. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e54af417af
More from William Barber II
It doesn’t say rest on your laurels, but to keep on pushing. In this work, sometimes you get heavy criticism. People do say ugly things, ‘You just want money.’ I just want other people to have health care. You know, Jesus healed everybody and never charged a co-pay.
I come from a unique place. North Carolina was the scene of the crime of the worst voter suppression, after the case out of Alabama and when the Supreme Court gutted Section 5. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that it’s like putting away your umbrella — the Shelby case, it was — putting away your umbrella in a rainstorm. And in North Carolina, Amy, when it was done, the Republicans there said, “Now that the problem has — the headache has been removed, we can do what we want to.” And guess what. Everything Pence just said, we heard in 2013. And they tried to roll back every progressive way of voting. And they actually went to the books and looked at how did it benefit Black and Brown people and young people, and those were the rules they tried to roll back. And the court said it was surgical — surgical racism. And what I saw in North Carolina, what we defeated in North Carolina, what we filed suit against in North Carolina, is now what Trump and Pence are talking about doing on the national level: surgical racism with surgical precision.
With its broad sweep, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us into an unprecedented national emergency. This emergency, however, results from a deeper and much longer term crisis — that of poverty and inequality, and of a society that ignores the needs of 140 million people who are poor or a $400 emergency away from being poor.