Trace Lysette Quotes

We exist in a culture where trans people are constantly delegitimized.

Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.

Poverty is sexist.

Being in the entertainment industry, I do have some privileges, but when I'm off sets and in the real world, I'm a trans individual whose rights and safety have been taken away.

Whenever you tell a group of people that they can't use bathrooms, or they can't access spaces that other people use, that is dehumanizing. It is discriminatory, and it reinforces the stigma and the prejudices that the transgender community already faces.

Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out.

I think we're living in a world where society is very difficult.

Nobody really believes in equality anyway.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

In today's Britain, the weakest among us are often assumed to be minority communities. In fact, the weakest are those minorities-within-minorities for whom the legal right to exit from their communities' constraints amounts to nothing before the enforcement of cultural and religious shaming.

There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abject conditions. Maybe there are some things at work in deciding who gets to be society's winners and who gets to be society's losers that don't have to do with merit.

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

If you've ever felt oppressed on any level, there's something from 'The Wire' that you can take and identify with.

The War on Poverty did not work because it was a war on shame … a war on the family and a war on God.

Social inequality kills. It unduly deprives individuals and communities experiencing social deprivation of their health, increases their burden of disease and disease, and cuts short their lives.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of the half of society over which the other half has power—from the exercises of the right of the strongest.

If you are on the wrong side of society you can’t win.

Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends.

Poverty is multidimensional. It extends beyond money incomes to education, health care, political participation and advancement of one's own culture and social organization.