DeRay Mckesson Quotes
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I am excited to return to city schools... and to continue doing the work to ensure that every child in Baltimore City receives a world-class education.
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People are more afraid of black unity than black rage.
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The history of blackness is also a history of erasure.
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For our kids to go to school, they must be alive, and for adults to work, they must not be in jail.
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Find an issue that's important to you, and be as curious and close to it as possible.
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People often confuse visibility with a lot of other things. Sometimes I become a proxy for things that just aren't true about me. People will say, 'DeRay got millions of dollars in grants.' That's just not true... I'm broke.
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I actually get very little phone calls. I get way more tweets and texts. My phone rarely rings.
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I love Baltimore. This city has made me the man that I am.
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Skills acquisition is really at the heart of what it means to learn.
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Sometimes, the hate that I endure is not necessarily about me but about the space I'm in.
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Expressing and loving myself is often so much more complex than 'out' affords me.
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Baltimore is a beautiful city. I started doing a lot of community organizing back in 1999 and met so many great people in neighborhoods all across the city. And that was an invaluable experience.
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Too often, the elected individuals we put our public trust in disappoint us.
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I was a teacher. I also worked at Harlem Children's Zone. I moved back to Baltimore and opened up an after-school, out-of-school program on the west side and then worked in two public school districts, in Baltimore and Minneapolis.
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There are people who have demonstrated their willingness to challenge systems and structures, and then when it comes to elections, some of those same people - I don't know where their fight went. What's interesting to me is to see people lose the revolution when it comes to elections.
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I will never forget the first time I was teargassed or the night I hid under my steering wheel as the SWAT vehicle drove down a residential street. I will never forget that it was illegal - in St Louis, in the fall of 2014 - to stand still.
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People in power make the path to power. It means that we will always get the same system, and it's one that is not necessarily in the interest of people's lives.
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People like to act like we don't have a legacy of racism here. I think people get really uncomfortable with it. We know that we can't change it unless we address that.
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Justice that is not rooted in equity, in social welfare, and in community is not justice at all.
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A cacophony of whispers is also noise. There are many ways to be heard, and there are many ways to be visible. There are many ways to be seen.
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I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.
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Bowdoin was the first place that I fell in love with. When I visited, I just had never been to a place with that many resources and that much access to information. That was stuff that you saw in movies. I didn't know that existed in real life.
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You are enough to start a movement. Individual people can come together around things that they know are unjust. And they can spark change.
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If you close your eyes and think about where you feel the most safe, you're probably not going to tell me it's in a room full of police. You feel safe where you're around people that love you, when you have food and shelter, when you're being pushed to be your best self and learn.