Audre Lorde Quotes

In the gun game, we are the most hunted. The river of blood that washes the streets of our nation flows mostly from the bodies of our black children.

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

The national conversation around white entitlement, around institutionalized racism, the Black Lives Matter movement, I think, came about in large part because of the widening and broadening of our understanding of inequality. That conversation was begun by Occupy.

We think of Shots Fired as almost an autopsy of Ferguson that shows the events from every street in the house. And, in dealing with these two murders of a black victim and a white victim, we show the ways that communities and the media deal with victims differently based on race.

Black folks tell their kids they have to be twice as good as a white person? Well, if I tell a child of mine that, or that they have to be careful - that this is what a cop would do if you do this - they think something is wrong with them. I tell them death is better.

What happens to Black Folks today, happens to White Folks tomorrow.

I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence.

There are many cases and layers of racist behavior in the US - from police treatment to the issues of education and job opportunities. In America, however, such cases are being discussed publically.

We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

Black culture is cool, but black issues sure aren't, huh?

Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.

When you're white, the sky's the limit. When you're black, the limit's the sky.

I talked to a lot of Black Lives activists in various states. What I learned is that the relationship of police departments around the country with the black community is far, far more severe and awful than I had originally known.

I don't believe for a minute anybody allowed people to suffer because they are African Americans.

Many White people are not sensitive to the kind of abuse that African Americans, especially younger African Americans, receive at the hands of police officers and police departments. I think for most Whites their experience with the police has been good or neutral because they don't interact with the police as much as those in the Black community.

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away.

And, for example, like, when you're having the conversation with your child about getting their driver's license. Well, a white family - their biggest fear is just that you're driving safely and that they're minding the rules of the road, whereas a black family - their biggest fear is that their child is going to get pulled over and treated unfairly for a reason that they won't understand.

For those who say that the war on drugs and the system of mass incarceration really isn't about race, I say there is no way we would allow the majority of young white men to be swept into the criminal justice system for minor drug offenses, branded criminals and felons, and then stripped of their basis civil and human rights while young black men who are engaged in the same activity trot off to college. That would never be accepted as the norm.

I'm a grandmother and like every grandmother, I worry about the safety and security of my grandchildren, but my worries are not the same as black grandmothers.

There are those who believe justice and dignity are reserved only for some people. Young men have died in police custody, and the growing heel of poverty has worn down harder on children of color...We must fight back.

Well, the white race in America is the same way. As individuals it is impossible for them to escape the collective crime committed against the Negroes in this country, collectively.

I think the O.J. Simpson trial was a revelation about the ongoing patterns of racial difference in American society.

Black people know what white people mean when they say “law and order”.