DeRay Mckesson Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
My father and mother deeply loved me and my sister.
-
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.
-
Asking people for money is really different than asking people for their support.
-
I'm not ashamed to be gay.
-
I think that I, because of student government and because of working in Baltimore, knew how to be creative with very little resources.
-
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.
-
If Trump is president, I think that his administration will do real structural damage that will take years or decades for us to undo.
-
The student newspapers are as important to me as the 'New York Times.'
-
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.
-
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.
-
Activism in the street is truth-telling, and organizing is talking to people for a specific goal.
-
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.
-
I am not naive enough to believe that voting is the only way to bring about transformational change, just as I know that protest alone is not the sole solution to the challenges we face.
-
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.
-
I've never been a surrogate for Bernie, Hillary, or the DNC.
-
I grew up in a world of Officer Friendly. It was just the image I had.
-
I think about all of my students who were math-phobic, who didn't believe they could learn math, who didn't understand, who didn't think they were smart enough, and by the end, they understood that they already had the gifts, and my job was to help them access them, and I believe that.
-
Black people have always been more than our pain. The joy is so much a part of how we have survived and thrived.
-
Baltimore is a city of possibility, and we've got to challenge the traditional pathways of politics and politicians who lay those paths.
-
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.
-
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.