Michael Seibel Quotes

I usually play disenfranchised youth.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

You are exacerbating inequality rather than opening up opportunity.

Silicon Valley today is populated mostly by people who would consider themselves winners of the traditional race. This causes the exclusion of the voices that are vital to a round, robust society. It's beyond gentrification.

I'm driven by the gaps, the things that are missing, the areas where marginalized people exist - and where the least resources are available for them.

Trans talent is not even making it into the audition room, and we're not even being afforded the opportunity to tell our own stories. I feel that is problematic.

I have my privileges, but I do feel like at every turn there is such resistance. Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything. All the time. I feel like I'm not taken seriously.

The way we imagine discrimination or disempowerment often is more complicated for people who are subjected to multiple forms of exclusion. The good news is that intersectionality provides us a way to see it.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

A poor man is like a foreigner in his own country.

Why are some people bullied? Because they are different. How? It doesn't matter.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

The value systems of those with access to power and of those far removed from such access cannot be the same. The viewpoint of the privileged is unlike that of the underprivileged.

The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

Throughout this country's history there have of course been systematic efforts to create an official underclass.

Power should not be concentrated in the hands of so few, and powerlessness in the hands of so many.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.

As you would expect when individualism is based only on opportunity, no one asks what happens to those who have neither the financial nor the political clout to exercise their tiny portion of that opportunity.

America’s real majority is suffering a minority complex of neglect. They have become the real foes of Negro rights, foreign aid, etc, because … they feel forgotten, at the second table behind the tightly organized smaller groups at either end of the U. S. spectrum.

Keeping people on the margins of cultural, social and political life constitutes in many nations one of the most glaring injustices of our time.

We will not settle for a state that will settle for an underclass.

If you are on the wrong side of society you can’t win.

By us, and not for us

Tackling inequality isn’t easy. It never has been and it never will be.