Aging & Wisdom Quote by Walter Annenberg

Annenberg’s line lands like a boardroom memo that accidentally reveals a moral worldview. “Mainstream of economic life” is corporate America’s favored euphemism: it sounds neutral, even benevolent, while quietly defining citizenship as participation in the wage-and-consumption economy. The sentence frames inclusion not as justice owed but as a risk-management necessity. If “young blacks” aren’t absorbed into the system, the system will have to keep stepping over them.

The subtext is paternalistic but also diagnostic. “Brought into” treats Black youth less as agents than as a population to be moved, trained, absorbed. Yet the warning is pointed: structural exclusion has predictable outcomes. “Continue” implies a history already underway, a cycle of marginalization that won’t break on its own. Annenberg’s choice of “curbstone” does heavy symbolic work. It evokes the street as both literal space (unemployment, informal economies, policing) and social position: visible, close to power, but not admitted inside. You can see the storefronts; you’re just not allowed through the door.

Context matters. Annenberg, a titan of media and philanthropy, spoke from the late-20th-century consensus that civil rights victories had to be “completed” through jobs and education. It’s the era’s integrationist logic, but filtered through elite anxiety: social stability depends on economic incorporation. The quote works because it compresses a whole ideology into a single image of the curb - a boundary line that feels mundane, even natural, until you notice who keeps getting left there and who gets to call that outcome avoidable.