Top 108 Quotes & Sayings by DeRay Mckesson - Page 2

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.

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.

I actually get very little phone calls. I get way more tweets and texts. My phone rarely rings.

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.

It is not a new tactic for people to use any avenue they can to silence black activists.

My father and mother deeply loved me and my sister.

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.

I grew up in a world of Officer Friendly. It was just the image I had.

Some people are more interested in fighting than winning.

As a protester, I protested because I had to, not because it was exciting. I don't want to get tear-gassed again.

I'm not ashamed to be gay.

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.

Expressing and loving myself is often so much more complex than 'out' affords me.

Skills acquisition is really at the heart of what it means to learn.

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.

I'm not convinced that stealing an iPhone is a felony or stealing a bike is a felony.

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.

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.

Baltimore is a city of possibility, and we've got to challenge the traditional pathways of politics and politicians who lay those paths.

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.

There is nothing romantic about teargas. Or smoke bombs or rubber bullets or sound cannons.

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.

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.

We question these issues of race and struggle and white privilege because we know that those issues are real and because those issues have real implications in black communities. And white supremacy is not only dangerous, but it is deadly.

Politics is compromise, by its very nature. But we never compromise on our values and beliefs.

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.

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.

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.

If City Hall started projecting swastikas, no one would say 'You know what? Free speech.' People would say that is wrong.

When I reflect on the Colbert interview, it moved so quickly that what we didn't do was define white privilege, and I wish we had done that. White privilege is the benefit resulting from white being seen as the standard, regardless of gender and income.

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.

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.

Everybody has told the story of black people in struggle except black people. The black people in the struggle haven't had the means to tell the story historically. There were a million slaves, but you see very few slave narratives. And that is intentional.

Social media allowed us to become our own storytellers. With it, we seized the power of our truth.

I'm not a politician. I'm somebody who knows the world can be better, and I'm willing to fight for it.

I've worked in two public school districts, Minneapolis and Baltimore, one as a senior leader. And while we might not always have agreed with the union, and we might have had deep differences, they came to the table.

I think the reality is that there's a role for everybody to play in the work of social justice and that we have to organize everybody. That means that Silicon Valley has to be organized, the fashion industry has to be organized, the formerly incarcerated have to be organized, the teachers.

If Trump is president, I think that his administration will do real structural damage that will take years or decades for us to undo.

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.

If anything, any success that I have ever experienced has been because people who didn't have to care about me did, and they pushed me to see things in myself that I did not see in myself at the time.

When our response to all trauma is to call the police, then that gets us into a cycle of perpetuating trauma. Mental health trauma is different from somebody breaking into a store. Those are not the same things, and our response has to be different.

Leadership means making sure that people are adequately skilled, making sure people are earning a living wage, making sure people have access to resources. That's not sexy, it doesn't sound great at a rally or a forum, but that is actually the work that it will take to change cities. We know that.

So much of what people think about when they think about health is primary care, but health is so much more than that. Health is about the decisions you make everyday. It's about where you sleep. It's about are you exercising, it's about what you eat.

It's important that people press from the outside. It's important that people are able to make change from the inside. Both of those things are important. Protest is fundamentally a political act.

Not only do we need to focus on classrooms, but adult literacy is a huge issue in historically marginalized communities. That's a crisis, and it's one that you can't see.

I've seen optimism because I grew up in communities of recovery where people put their lives back together and find tomorrows that they didn't think would be there. That fundamentally changed my life and is so much of where my hope comes from.

Donald Trump is dangerous. The truth is that the bigotry and hatred that he speaks have real consequences in people's lives.

I don't want to live in a world where Donald Trump is the President. He is not doing anything in Baltimore, but I am dedicated to using whatever platform I have to make sure that he is not the President. This is not simply a disagreement about ideas. It's a disagreement about values, and the values that he espouses are values of bigotry and hate, and that isn't OK.