Chirlane McCray Quotes

I hate labels.

I think putting labels on people is just an easy way of marketing something you don't understand.

Once you label me you negate me.

Society cannot continue to disable themselves through their need to categorize people or make assumptions as to another individual's abilities.

Sometimes America is so great because it brings all of us together, but sometimes it can be so limiting because it puts labels on things.

I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.

All labels are offensive in some way.

I don't want to be limited or ghettoized in any way.

If you try to smooth out society with a hot iron, you're liable to drive out all talent.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold onto the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own system of repression.

Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation.

Today, I see that many of our citizens are not free. They are dependent.

It never occurred to me that some people were seen as wrong or even different.

'Those people' is a bad word.

Ageism is a variation of racism or sexism, all the other isms.

I value what I learned from being cast in the margins and what that felt like.

Labels are actually not to make us understand things better: they are actually to ostracise and discriminate that what does not belong to the majority.

Racism seduces us with its desire to categorize, shutting out the living and breathing and 'different' world all around us.

I hate being categorized.

Sweden is a great country. What is not so great is that we have a society that, in a way, says it's great if you don't look right, if you don't look left, if you just look straight forward.

Wherever I go, people ask: 'What is she? What is she?' There has always been an agenda - they're excluding me or including me in something with that question. It is the first thing agents in Los Angeles ask me. And then I'd hear: 'You're not black enough, you're too black, you're Italian - no, you're Spanish.'

Society is better off without certain people.

People like to put you in a little box, and that's where they are comfortable with you being.

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.

Labels are for cans, not people.