Sterling K. Brown Quotes

Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.

I think that, by and large, the predominant voice we hear in rock music is a white male voice.

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.

... this is a grievance society and that if you want to get into its leading edge you pretty well have to be a victim.

Minorities…are almost always in the right.

Men continue to misinterpret the second-rate status of women as implying a privileged status for themselves; heterosexuals think the same way about homosexuals; gentiles about Jews; whites about blacks; haves about have-nots.

I've been there; I've been in the minority before. It humbles the exalted. But that's all right.

A lot of people think that intersectionality is only about identity. But it's also about how race and gender are structured in particular workforces.

It's just not funny to disrespect other people's beliefs, backgrounds, cultures, or identities when those are deeply rooted in longstanding oppression. Jokes that punch down on marginalized people require no creativity because they've existed since the beginning of time. It's like telling a knock-knock joke and believing you're Richard Pryor.

Feeling trapped in identity isn't just the purview of women and minorities.

Women are a minority the same way gay people are.

The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master's name.

When you're in the minority, it doesn't matter what you're agenda is, you're not going to have the degree of freedom that you have as a member of the majority.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

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

People are only mean when they're threatened, and that's what our culture does. That's what our economy does.

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

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.

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

I'm not a fan of identity politics.

The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past.

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

Many citizens see all the leadership of these large institutions together in a conspiracy against them rather than in any adversary relationship with each other.