How The Deck Is Stacked: If you’re really going to look at poverty, you are going to have to start looking at greed

“We didn’t know that we were poor,” Stringfellow said. “It was just like asking a fish 'how does that water feel?' The fish is going to say 'what water?' Because that is the only environment that they’ve ever known.”

Stringfellow is in her 40s, and says Cleveland is in no better shape today than it was when she was growing up. So why is the conversation over race and poverty so stuck here?

“Because you are going to start touching on tradition,” Stringfellow said. “You are going to start talking about mindset. You are going to start talking about family values that were passed down besides recipes.”

“One of the problems that I see is parents and other members of the community that have distrust of so many things in this world that they hold the next generation back. Certainly a distrust of the lawyer who comes knocking on the door saying, 'I'm here to help,'" he said. "If you take somebody who’s had stuff taken away from them their whole lives or have been tricked or disadvantaged or something somehow, in order to trust somebody, particularly a white person that's been doing that to the black community, our history's been terrible, for me to come knocking on the door saying, 'I'm here to help,' even though I am really here to help and I'm not getting paid by you, I do have your best interest at heart.”

Carr said the conversation about race and inequality is a tough one to have across racial lines.

“There are some people I can have it with and some people I can’t,” he said.

Carr said he grew up going to public high school and playing sports, and those interactions have helped him and others in his generation grow to being open-minded.

“But there is a generation before and certainly two generations before that will never change,” Carr said. “That generation I believe is just going to have to live the rest of their lives and die out.”

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