Justin Simien Quotes

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

Slavery didn't end in 1865; it just evolved.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

When I think of the trials and tribulations that black men go through in America and that black artists went through, I feel very privileged.

If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.

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.

Throughout every presidency since the heist of our country from indigenous peoples, the black American experience has been exceptional in its discomfort. And no chief executive of this great nation has, in earnest, developed a unique plan to remedy that discomfort.

The history of Black Americans in South Carolina is riddled with trials and tribulations.

In the U.S., while individual whites might be against racism, they still benefit from their group's control. Yes, an individual person of color can sit at the tables of power, but the overwhelming majority of decision-makers will be white. Yes, white people can have problems and face barriers, but systematic racism won't be one of them.

Black people in America have come from slavery to other forms of being oppressed and there are some things that come with that - some pain and anger that come with that and we as black people have to deal with it to heal that. White people have to understand it and have some compassion toward it.

What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It's the weight on our shoulders. That is what's actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.

Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this.

Law enforcement's biased view of the Irish lives on in the nickname we still use for the vehicles we use to transport groups of prisoners. It is, after all, the 'paddy wagon.' The Irish had tough times, but little compares to the experience on our soil of black Americans.

It is true that as people, we tend to remember only the positive. With time, the grim details fade away, and as a species we survive on this notion. In our desire to gloss over the undeniable macabre parts of our American history, we forget. That amnesia manifests itself, especially when dealing with the plight of black men.

I know I got it made while the masses of black people are catchin' hell, but as long as they ain't free, I ain't free.

That fallacy flies in the face of studies that show, every day, in every way, things are getting a little worse for America's minorities relative to the progress made by those in the top percentiles of assets and income.

All whites benefitted from American slavery.

We Blacks have a long history of serving as cannon fodder for interests that are not our own.

The dysfunction of African-Americans is directly related to the fact that African-Americans as a racial group are no longer needed to bolster the economy as they were in slavery days.

Modern technical civilization does not seem to be as well handled by the black man as by the white man in the United States

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.

Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he has done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States and the world. He walks us on a tightrope from birth.

The history of blacks is complicated, fragmented, disturbing to contemplate - not a neat trail of challenges met or of felled trees blocking the path to the mountain top.