Raoul Peck Quotes

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

Policing was developed, created, and implemented for the elite, and - in the case of the United States - the elites were and almost entirely remain white, upper middle class, cisgender straight men.

If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

There's only one free person in this society, and he is white and male.

There are two worlds out there - two Americas out there. If you're a white person, there's one way of being a citizen in our country, and if you're a brown or a black body, there's another way of being a citizen, and that way is very close to death. It's very close to the loss of your life.

If I were white, I could capture the world.

Poor privileged white men. Their stranglehold on power is slowly being loosened.

We need to have a discussion on race, but we also need to have a discussion on how we are treating poor and minority people in this country.

Oppression thrives on distance - on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed.

But blacks make little to no progress and, worse, the preoccupation with injustice only leaves them eternally inconsolable and cut off from their own best energies and talents.

We live in a society that has a long history of not valuing people of color or women.

There are all kinds of ways in which especially white men in this country have been helped by the government.

Anti-black racism operates at a society-wide level and colludes in a seamless web of policies, practices, and beliefs to oppress and disempower black communities.

I was born on an island with 96 percent of the people black. But all the power and the economy was in the hands of white people who only formed four per cent.

There is not racial or ethnic domination of hopelessness. It's everywhere.

What people don't know about oppression is that the oppressor works much harder. You always grew up being told you were not smart enough or not fast enough, but we all lived from the time we were children to beat the system.

Women are oppressed in the east, in the west, in the south, in the north. Women are oppressed inside, outside home, a woman is oppressed in religion, she is oppressed outside religion.

I learned early that I had to work harder than the white kids and harder than the boys.

I confront the European elite's self-image as tolerant 'while under their noses women are living like slaves.

As a black woman, I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful; the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

There are opportunities that I have because I'm a white dude, and it's controversial because that's just the way that the world we live in kind of is.

Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.