Margot Lee Shetterly Quotes

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world.

Racism was a big part of our community. I'm not going to revisit history, and I'm not going to call out those communities, but the communities we grew up around, we were treated like second- or third-class citizens.

I cannot be made into the commentator for the unspoken black masses.

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.

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

Black man, you are on your own.

You know, people'd always ask 'Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?' They never seen the house I'm running from.

In one sense, the stories I read betrayed me. Too few gave me back my mirror image. Fewer still spoke to, or acknowledged, the existence of the problems I faced as a black foster child from a dysfunctional and badly broken home.

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

The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger.

By virtue of their being regarded as something "exceptional," even by friends and well-wishers, Negroes of attainment and genius have been unfairly disassociated from the group, and group credit lost accordingly.

Most blacks are happy, except those who have had other ideas pushed into their ears.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

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.

I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.

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.

Being black in America - especially as I was growing up - the feeling of oppression, the feeling of being outcast, the feeling of not having a voice was part of my life.

As a black woman, I feel like I have a unique experience that we don't often see in media portrayals of the South.

It's fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility - this too is part of the work, is indeed central to [my photographs]... This invisibility - this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time - is the greatest source of my longing.

Now people like Susan Sarandon are noticing that people of color live this way?! This is the way I've always lived! What's happened is that it has now reached a level of national discourse where it's on the table. But they've never minded that we were treated like this off-stage.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

I believe that when it comes to major foreign policy issues, many prefer to have black people seen and not heard.

History simmers beneath the surface in more communities than just Ferguson.