Justin Simien Quotes

As a woman, as a Jew, as a lesbian, as a labor leader in a time of great anti-union animus, I know that other people project their biases on me. But it is nothing like the experience of our African-American brothers and sisters, especially black and brown men and boys.

When someone lives as a minority, they experience the world differently than those of us who live in the majority. We may occupy the same physical space, but we don't occupy the same psychic space.

As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.

The great thing about being a standard-issue, straight white person is you have so much time. Gay people, people of color, we have less time! We have to be a living Learning Annex to everybody. We don't have time to master hobbies like skipping rocks along lakes.

Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.

He was murdered by every member of the gospel who has remained silent about racial discrimination—who has hidden behind the stained glass windows of his church.. He was murdered by every Negro who accepted segregation.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. the history of the capsulize era is characterized by the degradation of my people: despoiled of their lands, their true culture destroyed...denied equal protection of the law, and deprived their rightful place in the respect of their fellows.

I'm all for philosophical debates about race, but if you look at history, you see that the status quo has power when it's unchallenged. So these conversations about inequality are crucial.

You spend your whole lifetime in your occupation, actually making life clever, easy and convenient for white people. But when you have to get transportation home, you are denied an equal accommodation. Our existence was for the white man's comfort and well-being; we had to accept being deprived of just being human.

In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.

The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable.

In a sense, mass incarceration has emerged as a far more extreme form of physical and residential segregation than Jim Crow segregation. Rather than merely shunting people of color to the other side of town, people are locked in literal cages - en masse.

Racism has its boot squarely wedged on the neck of black communities, and we don't want to be told that hard work and responsibility are the answer.

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

All too often, white documentary filmmakers are the ones telling the stories of people of color.

I know what it's like to be denied opportunity based on the nature of your skin.

When the residue of oppression and fear are compounded over time, when the historical precedents of policing and discrimination manifest themselves over and over again, the very act of waking up to a world complicit in your distress can feel like a herculean task. But black people are human beings, just like everyone else.

Some issues just need to be dealt with - that we're still dealing with in the world, with police brutality and racism.

White Americans have the option of not having to think about race on a daily basis. People of color don't. Race is a major deciding factor in their lives and the histories of their families.

When I first started out as a young journalist, I know that on at least two occasions, when I walked into a newsroom, I knew I was replacing the black person in that job.

I know that I am a black man in a white world. . . I know that I never had it made.

The Negro pays for what he wants and begs for what he needs.