Ayanna Pressley Quotes

The same way I'm not afraid of calling out systemic discrimination, I'm also not afraid of calling out inequality and the fact that inequality is growing in society and that affects everybody, regardless of race.

Black women's lives have never been shown any value in America.

I'm a long-term optimist, and I don't think the problems with our society are from being overly optimistic.

However, while we should certainly celebrate the demise of overt official racism, we must also critically examine where we are at this historical moment, recognize the many challenges ahead and reaffirm our commitment to making Brown v. Board a reality.

Black people cannot look to government to solve their problems.

We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age.

There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.

Education in this country is about how to maintain the status quo and to perpetuate racism.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.

Slavery was gone but its inequalities remained.

I'm not familiar particularly with Hillary Clinton's neighborhood, but I wish people were a little bit more curious about what we call privilege and about why it's there. Black people in this country have no choice but to be curious. We have to know. I wish folks would do a little bit more investigation.

The issue with race particularly within this country is largely because of lack of dialogue.

#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.

Everyone who has a pair of eyes in this country understands the racial tensions and the issues we have are very serious and they're not going away. Just because we had Barack Obama as our president and, on paper, everything looks equal, it's very clearly not.

The history of racial violence in our country is both omnipresent and unspoken. It is a smog that surrounds us that few will admit is there.

Implicit bias - our subconscious associations of race - permeates everything that we do. And we must pursue systemic accountability to fix it.

So people thought once Obama got into office that racism was over with. But, what we ended up learning was that it just came more into the light.

Systemic racism is something that diminishes all of us. Of course its worst effects are for its victims, but our entire country is held back through the inequality and the mistrust that it creates.

Without an advocate for the poor, without a new state of mind in America, the country lies on the brink of anarchy.

There are still traces of discrimination against race and gender, but it's a lot different than when I started out. It just comes quietly, slowly, sometimes so quietly that you don't realize it until you start looking back.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.