Sharice Davids Quotes

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder

So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.

We are less than honest and commit a grave error if we insist that what happened to Rodney G. King was isolated and an exceptional case. The poor know better.

At the time when I was in college, Oscar Grant had just lost his life in Oakland, Calif. He was an unarmed young black male who had a record. And at the time when his death was making headlines, more people were talking about what he had done in his past than the fact that he unjustly lost his life.

#BlackLivesMatter brought a new sense of urgency, audacity, and outrage to the issue of police violence against black men that has made it impossible to ignore, to cover up, or to justify.

I understand the outrage because it seems the list continues to grow: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. The injustices continue to mount and nothing seems to be changing.

The night that George Zimmerman was acquitted, I think, for black people all over the world, there was a collective feeling of incredible grief and incredible rage. And that verdict not only let George Zimmerman go home to his family, but it sent a message to black people everywhere that our lives did not matter.

Black lives are too easy to take in America because we don't want to question why people are so afraid of black and brown people to begin with. And that's what I want 'Strong Island' to do.

It is apparent, if you go back through our history, that the grand juries of the criminal justice system do not value black lives.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

If you had the Klu Klux Klan killing 200 Black kids in a community, we would have a problem and pay attention to it. If Black kids killed 200 white kids, we would pay attention to that. But when 200 Black kids kill 200 Black kids, we pay that less attention.

It saddens me that African Americans - when they express their pain, when they protest about police violence, when they question inequality, when they raise issues of bondage and discrimination - African Americans are seen as not patriotic.

The George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin affair is one of the most important and clarifying moments in American history.

What fixes your spirit when Ferguson happens? When Trayvon Martin and those kind of things happen, they hurt your spirit; it hurts your heart and your soul. You need something to fix it.

Anne Marie Schubert is one of the most horrible district attorneys in the state of California. She represents Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions. It's no wonder she continuously refuses to hold the police accountable for violence against people of color.

#BlackLivesMatter has raised the bar in our national dialog: Addressing economic inequality is necessary but not sufficient. It is also necessary to directly confront racial injustice.

We have seen communities cry out in pain, generation after generation, because of racism and police brutality.

I hope that audiences understand that there is a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address, that there has always been a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address. In fact, our country is built on the precariousness of black lives, the disposability of black lives.

The cure for the Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner tragedies is not education or exposure. It's the gospel.

Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Mya Hall, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland - these names are important. They're inherently important, and the space that #BlackLivesMatter held and continues to hold helped propel the conversation around the state-sanctioned violence they experienced.

I am the unarmed black kid who maybe needed a hand, but instead was given a bullet.

As African-Americans, that's what's being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it's because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body.

It's not surprising to me that in a country born of racial genocide, the issue of race is still an open wound on the American soul. We haven't dealt with it.

In the same way that Occupy Wall Street forever elevated that concept of income inequality, the Black Lives Matter protesters have elevated the idea of inequity in policing as it relates to minority communities.

The poor and minorities are disproportionately both crime's perpetrators and its victims. People are saddened when this happens but not surprised.