Boots Riley Quotes
I've gotten stopped for reckless eyeballing, for staring too hard. These officers think they're Tarzan and this is a jungle, that all the animals need to be tamed.
The police knew she was a leftist but most didn’t really understand what that meant. In those days, police were not very well educated and many had no more than a few grades of elementary school. They were assigned to keep order at her public speeches (where there were sometimes protestors threatening violence), but the police would often erroneously assume that something she would say was illegal—freedom of speech was not what it is today. She was quite used to the harassment. Most police at the beginning of the 21st century are still generally undereducated with only a small minority being college graduates.
Alexie, an American Indian, studied wrote about the phenomenon whereby the Indians who were brutalized and attacked by whites with modern weapons and other technological advantages, in the process of defending themselves and their way of life became oppressors to whites in many situations where they could dominate a local scene. Likewise, the Israelis, who were totally oppressed in the Middle East for years and dominated by the more numerous Arabs with over a dozen established national armies attacking the Jewish civilian population when Israel first became a state. However the Jews survived and each time the Arabs attacked and further oppressed the Israelis, the Jews became stronger until at some point the became oppressors of many of the Arabs. The oppressors became the oppressed and vica versa.
Instead of standing and saluting as professional athletes have done for decades before games, he kneeled and refused to stand. This caused great public criticism but also some initial support. He was potentially risking his multimillion dollar salary as this technically violated his contract to avoid anything embarrassing to the team. He also donated $1 million to programs in the area that were working to enhance Black/white understanding. Even those who disagreed with his choice of protest defended his right to do so, and after the initial furor, public opinion, while not in agreement about his method, tended to support him for having the courage of his convictions and using his celebrity for a worthy cause. After sensing the public opinion, his team matches his $1 donation. Professional athletes both in the NFL and in other sports then began to do the same as a form of protest for the large, disproportionate, number of black men who were killed, mostly when unarmed, by police. The reference to the “paid leave” was the practice followed by most police departments—usually required by collective bargaining agreements with police unions—of placing police officers accused of committing violations of laws or regulations on paid administrative leave while all the investigations, hearings, and other processes . While this practice protected the rights of those police officers who were not guilty, it ended up paying brutal murders for a some time entire their case was decided or acted upon be the district attorney.
Raymond Lawrence "Boots" Riley, is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, rapper, and communist activist. He is the lead vocalist of The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club. He made his feature-film directorial debut with Sorry to Bother You (released July 2018), which he also wrote.
