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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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I'm not ashamed to be gay.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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My father and mother deeply loved me and my sister.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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The student newspapers are as important to me as the 'New York Times.'
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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Asking people for money is really different than asking people for their support.
DeRay Mckesson
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I have a big following on Twitter, and Twitter has been invaluable for mobilizing and quickly sharing information. But I'm not really sure that people are learning deep content on Twitter.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
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We have to create a world where people can show up as whole people every single time.
DeRay Mckesson
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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.
DeRay Mckesson
