DeRay Mckesson Quotes

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

There's this idea of America that some people have to win and some have to lose, so certain things are in place to make this happen. Some people have to be the next legislators and political elites, and some have to fill the prisons and work in McDonald's. That's how America works. It's a machine which needs people up top and people down low.

Politics isn't about left versus right; it's about top versus bottom.

Washington has become this place that people don't leave. It has become this permanent feudal class.

And when people in power can stay in power they do very little to tinker with the apparatus that put them in power.

In the sense that you're not at the centre of power, like a president or prime minister of a major power, everyone is marginalised; my position doesn't isn't unique in that respect. I think there are different sorts of relevance in different contexts.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood.'

Inequality [is] a social control mechanism supported by financial interests’ belief in the desirability of oligarchy.

I tell my students that the single most powerful thing that we have in this country - something that literally harbors no dissent and no questioning - is the all-powerful elite narrative.

There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.

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

Inside every working anarchy, there's an Old Boy Network.

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

The violence in society, I'm afraid, is perpetrated by the people at the top.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

As a black woman, I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful; the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

I have met the people who run the world, and I am not in awe of them.

All systems are oligarchy. There is no other.

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will 'take our country back' from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.

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

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

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

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.