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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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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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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My father and mother deeply loved me and my sister.
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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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When I think about protest, I worry so much that people think about it only as standing in the streets. And I say that as someone who has been standing in the streets of cities across the country - but at the root of it is this idea of telling the truth in public.
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The student newspapers are as important to me as the 'New York Times.'
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I'm not ashamed to be gay.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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What we know to be true is that comfort isn't always freedom. People confuse the two.
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Asking people for money is really different than asking people for their support.
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I grew up in a world of Officer Friendly. It was just the image I had.
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It will always be important that people continue to push on the system from the outside. It will also be important that people make the changes that we know are necessary on the inside.
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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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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 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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Black people have always been more than our pain. The joy is so much a part of how we have survived and thrived.
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Activism in the street is truth-telling, and organizing is talking to people for a specific goal.