"I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go"
About this Quote
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s line lands because it refuses the two easy postures American race talk loves most: triumphalism and despair. He grants “progress” without turning it into a victory lap, then immediately checks the temptation to treat improvement as closure. That pivot - “but we have a long way to go” - is the whole engine of the quote. It’s a moral accounting trick: acknowledge receipts, keep the debt on the ledger.
The phrase “since I was a boy” does quiet but crucial work. Abdul-Jabbar isn’t arguing from abstraction; he’s invoking a living timeline that stretches from segregation-era childhood into the present, a span that includes civil rights legislation, busing fights, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and the contemporary backlash politics that insist racism is either solved or imaginary. His authority isn’t just celebrity; it’s duration. He’s seen the country evolve, and he’s seen how quickly it tries to declare itself finished.
As an athlete, he also speaks from a profession that America celebrates as “meritocratic” while policing its performers’ voices. The subtext is a rebuttal to “stick to sports” without needing to say it. He’s reminding us that Black excellence can’t be used as proof of national innocence.
The sentence is deliberately plain: no slogans, no hashtags, no statistics. That restraint is strategic. It invites consensus on the first clause, then presses that consensus into responsibility on the second. Progress is real, he implies, but it’s not self-sustaining - and it doesn’t count if it anesthetizes urgency.
The phrase “since I was a boy” does quiet but crucial work. Abdul-Jabbar isn’t arguing from abstraction; he’s invoking a living timeline that stretches from segregation-era childhood into the present, a span that includes civil rights legislation, busing fights, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and the contemporary backlash politics that insist racism is either solved or imaginary. His authority isn’t just celebrity; it’s duration. He’s seen the country evolve, and he’s seen how quickly it tries to declare itself finished.
As an athlete, he also speaks from a profession that America celebrates as “meritocratic” while policing its performers’ voices. The subtext is a rebuttal to “stick to sports” without needing to say it. He’s reminding us that Black excellence can’t be used as proof of national innocence.
The sentence is deliberately plain: no slogans, no hashtags, no statistics. That restraint is strategic. It invites consensus on the first clause, then presses that consensus into responsibility on the second. Progress is real, he implies, but it’s not self-sustaining - and it doesn’t count if it anesthetizes urgency.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|
More Quotes by Kareem
Add to List
