Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

There's a lot of talk now about the PC police, and 'why is everything bad?' It isn't. What it is, is that marginalized and oppressed people who have never had a soapbox, who have never been given a microphone, suddenly have a microphone.

Fault lines run along color lines in American public life, and the women's movement is no exception. Over the years, feminism has become more inclusive but there is still hard work to be done to include LGBT women and communities of color.

Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.

We must make sure #MeToo breaks the race, class, gender, and faith lines that make it so hard for marginalized people to be heard.

I think that because human difference for so long, in all its various forms, has been the root of so much oppression, sometimes there's the impulse to say let's deny the difference, as though by wishing away the difference we can then wish away the oppression.

Only when the oppressed are heard can we have an honest solutions based dialogue.

The way we imagine discrimination or disempowerment often is more complicated for people who are subjected to multiple forms of exclusion. The good news is that intersectionality provides us a way to see it.

This white man who is saying "it takes time." For three hundred and more years they have had "time," and now it is time for them to listen.

Usually, when people talk about the "strength" of black women . . . . they ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.

Homeboy Industries has chosen to stand with the 'demonized' so that the demonizing will stop; it stands with the 'disposable' so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.

Oh, happy day when the enemies of ascendancy have got to confess that people of color rock.

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

No, we are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

I'm concerned about - the oppression of the poor.

I'm not saying I'm the only Jewish person who cares about Palestinian people, but unfortunately, their voices are not necessarily heard as loudly as they should be.

As an African-American, as a woman, I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down, never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important.

Sexual, racial, gender violence and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

Each one of our ideas should benefit the people with less power than us.

Justice often means taking power from some who have it and giving it to some who do not.

Keeping people on the margins of cultural, social and political life constitutes in many nations one of the most glaring injustices of our time.

I believe the time has come for equal rights for everyone in this country, even for white people.

Don’t play with us. If you’re not going to give us justice, let us go so that we may help ourselves….We can’t want for benevolent white people to give us handouts.

A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

Achieving legal rights is only a first step in achieving equality.