Dee Rees Quotes

White Americans today don't know what in the world to do because when they put us behind them, that's where they made their mistake... they put us behind them, and we watched every move they made.

It's a real uphill challenge to battle the white-guyness.

I say stupid white men are always the problem. That's never going to change.

There is racism all over the United States. Most Southerners I know, we definitely find ourselves defending our heritage.

It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.

Growing up in a predominantly white area of the predominantly white state of Wisconsin, it was, I'm sad to say, relatively easy for me to go through life without recognizing or reckoning with the obvious signs of racism.

I think 'Dear White People,' the show, is a tremendous artistic achievement. It's always hinting that there is something beyond the pleading and wokeness, something that the show's more militant characters can't see.

The scars and stains of racism are still deeply embedded in the American society.

Our communities are being destroyed by racial tension - and we're too polite to talk about it.

Of course there's racism in this country, and we have a terrible history of that in this nation.

When I grew up in West Baltimore, anything associated - and I'm talking about my childhood - with white people 99 percent of the time was something malevolent, like it was an explanatory force for something bad.

On any given day, there's always something I'd rather be doing than facing the ugly, racist underbelly of America.

Do you know how big of an insult that is to me - to say that I had to be brave to confront some ignorant white folks?

In our country, racism is never far below the surface.

One of the most important misunderstandings for white people to get over to move forward is this idea that racism is a good-bad proposition - that if we're good we can't be part of it, that being uncomfortable means you're a terrible person. We have to let go of that and understand it as a system we all live in.

We've come a long way from the days of Jim Crow, and yes, we elected a black president, but racism lives.

I come up in a segregated 1943 atmosphere of segregation.

'Mudbound' highlights the fact that we're still battling a lot of the same issues as we were all of those decades ago.

I think the most harmful belief passed on to me - not always directly - was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up.

We are in the year 2013, and racism is still amongst us and is still a problem. It's not simply an argument for the History Channel or something that belongs to the past or something that only happens in other countries.

I became aware of how the world is and how the white establishment plays black people against each other.

I think race in America is a huge one. That's something that needs to be confronted, certainly.

Like a nontechnical user trying to understand a technical problem, our racial illiteracy limits our ability to have meaningful conversations about race.

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

I sometimes think they should have said 'Black Lives Matter Too,' because that is really what is being said. The outcry is that historically and presently, the feeling is that black lives don't matter as much as white lives because we don't see the same type of things happening to them.