DeRay Mckesson Quotes

Do our children now have to choose between getting an education and dying? Some of us cannot move on and accept that kind of society.

We don't have time to waste. Our communities are crumbling; our children are under siege. Failing schools and a for-profit prison-industrial complex are sucking the life out of black homes and communities. We are not going down like this!

I don't understand Chicago, but I really do hope that the Commander-in-Chief addresses his home town. I think those young kids don't see outside their small box. I think they don't see outside their circumstances, so they kind of resort to anything.

There's a burden of responsibility for me to show up correct - in my head, if I don't do it right, then I'll get shut out, and then other trans women of color will be shut out.

I went to school with a lot of kids whose fathers and mothers were part of the El Paso black history.

The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It's a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago.

Native communities are focal points for the excrement of industrial society.

If your community is founded on an injustice, that injustice cannot be questioned.

The attacks in Orlando - the worst mass shooting and the worst attack on the LGBTQ community in our history - shocked the conscience of our nation.

The poor are the only ones who suffer. And they're used to it.

All Americans should be deeply troubled by the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. We've seen such tragedies far too many times, and our hearts go out to the families and communities who've suffered such a painful loss.

I'm beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of deathamong Americans. What you don't know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright's character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.

The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and-above all-economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.

I probably do the most for the gay and lesbian community, or LGBT, but I don't have one that I focus on. I just try and kind of do a lot for different charities.

The fact is in a city like Chicago, for example, unemployment in the black community is around 20 percent for adults, 35 percent for youth, they bail out the banks, public schools, there is a deep divide. We need a plan for reconstruction and redevelopment and I hope that - police are the gatekeepers but behind that gate are these problems of disparities and injustice.

The reason that the World Trade Center got hit is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don't have any hope for a better life.

Only the disenfranchised can party with abandon.

What I'm trying to tell people is that police brutality in the 'hood is nothing new. And the thing is that whether this guy, the cop killer in my song, is real or not, believe it, there are people at that point.

You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it.

I'M SAD, because another young life was lost from his family, the racial divide has widened, a community is in shambles, accusations, insensitivity hurt and hatred are boiling over, and we may never know the truth about what happened that day.

The important thing to remember is it's not about balance; it's about integration... to really focus on making sure you're integrating all four aspects of your work, your family, your community and yourself. And it's not about trying to spend equal amounts of time on everything you do each day on each of these things, but making sure you're paying attention to all the things that make it up as a whole human being.

I choose the poverty of our poor people. But I am grateful to receive it (the Nobel) in the name of the hungry, the naked, the homeless, of the crippled, of the blind, of the lepers, of all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.

So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them.

The suffering inflicted, and more often than not on the most vulnerable sectors of society, demeans all of us as humanity. That it is invariably women, children, the aged and disabled who suffer in these conflicts stands to the added shame of humankind.

I think that even the Mexican society is a victim of all of this, of these crimes of "cleaning" people, of discarding people.