Shepard Fairey Quotes

I'm not a fan of identity politics.

Social change can be painful for all involved—oppressor and oppressed.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

One doesn't want one's identity coerced.

This is a hard job to do …. We represent the underdog, and that makes the top dogs angry.

Freedom looks differently when you are the one it is being practiced on.

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

I would like to share with you my plan to destroy America…. I would invest in ethnic identity and victimology. I would get them to think that their lack of success was only the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry.

I have seen how leaders rule by intimidation. Leaders who demonize and dehumanize entire groups of people often do so because they have nothing else to offer. And I have seen how places that stifle the voices and dismiss the potential of their citizens are diminished: how they are less vital, less hopeful, less free.

I would probably have more in common with a whale than with a bourgeois married couple employed at worthy institutions that I would wipe from the face of the earth if it was given to me to do so.

I'm a straight white man - I have options, and I'm not blocked on a consistent basis when I wake up in the morning because of my race, sex, and orientation.

Only a straight white person would have no concept of what visibility is. They've never contended with anything but visibility.

I don't know why people like being oppressed.

Intersectionality is an analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power. Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members but often fail to represent them.

Labels can be really helpful when we have the autonomy to label ourselves. But when other people label us without our permission, that's when it becomes dangerous.

So I'd much rather get across the concept of freedom. It's what's important to Indian children. The only way you can be free is to know is that you are worthwhile as a distinct human being. Otherwise you become what the colonizers have designed, and that is a lemming. Get in line, punch all the right keys, and die.

However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

Social justice is a cancer. Social justice means you are ruled by whatever the mob does. What social justice does is destroy individual responsibility.

I've always done everything at my disposal to avoid labeling what I do, or to avoid being labeled myself.

The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

I'm not a big fan of identity politics and sort of picking one thing and defining yourself with it.

I can't discriminate? Oh, that's ripe, coming from a straight white man. What's the matter, baby doesn't feel like he belongs? Well why don't you try a place that was set up just for you? Like the world!