DeRay Mckesson Quotes
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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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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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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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As a gay black man, it's important to me to show up - that I'm able to show up as my whole self, in every space that I'm in, because that's how I'm able to be the most true to who I am.
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The police, at their best, do three things; they prevent crime, they respond to crime, and they solve crime. In all three of those buckets, they need the trust of the community to do it, so I believe that if we restore the trust that we will change the way police are experiencing communities and ways that will preserve life and make everyone safer.
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I think about freedom and the urgency around our imagination. If you can't imagine it, you can't fight for it.
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I grew up in a world of Officer Friendly. It was just the image I had.
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If Trump is president, I think that his administration will do real structural damage that will take years or decades for us to undo.
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I am often asked what it is like to be on the 'front line.' But I do not use the term 'front line' to describe us, the protesters. Because everywhere in America, wherever we are, our blackness puts us in close proximity to police violence.
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I'm a black, gay man, and I should be able to live in a world where I'm able to live in the complexity of my identity in a way that is safe and secure, like everyone else.
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My father and mother deeply loved me and my sister.
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So many of us don't know what we want; we just know we don't want what we have. We spend 99% of the time talking about how bad it is, but only 1% of the time talking about how we can do something about it.
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I'm not ashamed to be gay.
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I think that Silicon Valley and technology can play a huge role in redefining what community looks like and how people come together and what authentic relationships look like, but that is not only their burden.
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When Trump says, 'Make America great again,' he is referencing an era when people were singled out and harmed because of their race and religious beliefs, and when violent enforcement of Jim Crow masqueraded as the will of the people.
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It's important to acknowledge the danger when we provide an academic venue for racism. It's interesting to hear people push the, quote, 'free speech' narrative in this way. They deny the speech of the people who disagree.
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I think people are uncomfortable talking about the racist history of this country and what we need to do to undo the impact of racism.
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The student newspapers are as important to me as the 'New York Times.'
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It is one thing to talk about fundraising and another to do it as a candidate, and I have learned so much about how much money it costs to run a campaign and what it means to raise money.
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The difference between equity and equality is that equality is everyone get the same thing and equity is everyone get the things they deserve.
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I just couldn't believe that the police would fire tear gas into what had been a peaceful protest. I was running around, face burning, and nothing I saw looked like America to me.
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Trump wants to take us back to a time when people like him could abuse others with little to no consequence, when people like him could exploit the labor of others to build vast amounts of wealth, when people like him could create public policy that specifically benefited them while suppressing the rights and social mobility of others.
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I think that I, because of student government and because of working in Baltimore, knew how to be creative with very little resources.
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We have to create a world where people can show up as whole people every single time.