Ava DuVernay Quotes

We would solve a lot of huge problems that are causing massive suffering. Poverty, violence, homophobia, heterosexism, racism, the environment - all these things that are crippling us. We need big, bold, dangerous, crazy ideas to solve these problems. When failure is not an option, innovation and creativity are not options.

The prison-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex are here with us and are multi-billion dollar enterprises. We can make more money off the kid in Compton if he's a criminal instead of a scholar. It's business.

I don't think I understood the full extent of the trauma experienced by people who churn through America's prisons until I began taking the time to listen to their stories.

The very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That's why I say we have not ended racial caste in America; we've merely redesigned it.

'Slavery by Another Name' is an important book that I think all Americans should read, about how, following the end of slavery, a new system of racial and social control was born, known as 'convict leasing.'

The success of the few does not excuse the caste-like system that exists for many. In fact, black exceptionalism - the high-profile, highly visible examples of the black success - actually serves to justify and rationalize mass incarceration.

I think that we are all deeply, deeply committed to the liberation of black people. And so, when you put people together who have and share that commitment, the sky is the limit.

Everybody's life matters. But that's why we have to say black lives matter, because the highest disproportionality, police brutality, disenfranchisement, education disproportionality in school discipline, curriculum, misrepresentation, all of this.

I've been an activist since I was a teenager. I was always curious about what we would now call social justice. I remember just trying to navigate growing up poor in an overpoliced environment with a single mother and a father who was in and out of prison.

Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.

I want to live in a world that is less white supremacist, straight supremacist, male supremacist.

It feels that while the young people are trying to fight for a world where there's equality, everyone's the same, everyone's helping each other, we want to take care of the planet... it seems like the people that are ruling and are being presidents right now want to do it the other way round.

The main lesson I took from Gamergate is that asking the status quo to do the right thing doesn't work.

The whole reason behind my album 'Free TC' is seeing all that police brutality, injustice, mass incarceration.

Given that by age 23, almost a third of Americans are arrested for a crime, it becomes clear that in the new militarized state young people, especially poor minorities, are viewed as predators, a threat to corporate governance, and are treated as disposable populations.

It's the new slavery. It came out of the drug laws and it really is something we're going to have to confront, but I don't see enough people up in arms about that. We need to be.

After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union's gulag—the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition.

All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.

The function of law and theology are the same: to keep the poor from taking back by violence what the rich have stolen by cunning.

As a criminal you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

All prisons are brimming over with innocence. It is those who cram their fellows into them, in the name of empty ideas, who are the only guilty ones.

Whatever your issue is, whether it's racism or homophobia or policy issues or taxes or urban decay or health care, you're not going to go anywhere with it if we don't focus on the concentration of power.

The vote, punishment... these ideas are anathema to the liberal mind

Black folks are judged by quantity, not quality. It's a decimal point or figure. How different is that from slavery? There's no moral code, it's just about successful business for America.

I truly believe slavery is why, as a by-product, we still have a disproportionate amount of black men incarcerated in America. It is an extension of that legacy, and that's not going to start to diminish until black people have a new sense of themselves that isn't tied to slavery and feeling inferior. I think the church can be instrumental in that, in terms of repentance, reconciliation and just being more embracing of each other - not just on Sunday, but in life generally.