In honor of our new Black Lives Matter sticker design, we wanted to post a list of some of the best quotes related to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“When it comes to things such as sugar and rice, most people believe that brown is superior to white. But when it comes to human beings, they believe that the opposite is true.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“We didn’t do anything illegal, All we ever did was be black.. #BlackLivesMatter”
― Genereux Philip
“I wasn’t surprised about what happened in Baltimore, because of what we had seen in Ferguson.
I don’t believe in rioting and all, but I know peaceful protesters are very hard to be seen.
What I see with Baltimore, Ferguson and other mass protests is what has been given birth is the Black Lives Matter movement. My insight on that is the black lives do matter but it must matter to black people first. If it doesn’t matter to black people, why should it matter to anyone else?”
― Arthur “Silky Slim” Reed, former Crip leader and African American activist.
“There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race. Scientifically, anthropologically, racism is a construct — a social construct. And it has benefits. Money can be made off of it, and people who don’t like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So it has a social function, racism.”
― Toni Morrison
“It was the last day of school, and I was walking with my dad, preparing to leave. Suddenly, he paused, looked at me intently and said, ‘Son, you’re a black male, and that’s two strikes against you.’ To the general public, anything that I did would be perceived as malicious and deserving of severe punishment and I had to govern myself accordingly. I was seven years old.”
― Robert Stephens, from a piece by Jazmine Hughes
“I think the reason that the organizers use the phrase ‘black lives matter’ was not because they were suggesting that no one else’s lives matter. Rather, what they were suggesting was there is a specific problem that is happening in the African-American community that isn’t happening in other communities. And that is a legitimate issue that we have to address. The African-American community is not just making this up. It’s not just something being politicized. This is real.”
― Barack Obama
“We’ll probably have to have a few uncomfortable conversations to sort of get things right, so everybody can walk and enjoy America like it’s supposed to be enjoyed.”
― Jamie Foxx
“The Black Lives Matter Network, a network of 39 chapters, has grown incredibly in the last two years. This dedicated web of Black organizers, activists, healers, direct action practitioners, youth, and elders has created space for Black people to make national demands by taking action locally in their neighborhoods, cities, and states.”
― Black Lives Matter organization
“Most people write me off when they see me.
They do not know my story.
They say I am just an African.
They judge me before they get to know me.
What they do not know is
The pride I have in the blood that runs through my veins;
The pride I have in my rich culture and the history of my people;
The pride I have in my strong family ties and the deep connection to my community;
The pride I have in the African music, African art, and African dance;
The pride I have in my name and the meaning behind it.
Just as my name has meaning, I too will live my life with meaning.
So you think I am nothing?
Don’t worry about what I am now,
For what I will be, I am gradually becoming.
I will raise my head high wherever I go
Because of my African pride,
And nobody will take that away from me.”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All Africans: How Every African Can Live the Life of Their Dreams
“The problem is, there is no geographical cure. No matter where we (Black American Folk) go, we are still too plugged into this place. Our cousins, grandmothers, aunts, nieces will be in this place. And the second we start looking at it as a “them” problem, we become another problem.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker
“But the thing is, we treat racism in this country like it’s a style that America went through. Like flared legs and lava lamps. Oh, that crazy thing we did. We were hanging black people. We treat it like a fad instead of a disease that eradicates millions of people. You’ve got to get it at a lab, and study it, and see its origins, and see what it’s immune to and what breaks it down.”
―Chris Rock
“Our white allies can alleviate their fears by returning the country to some imagined golden age of the friendly neighborhood constable, whistling as he strolls his beat, idly swinging his baton. Black Americans don’t have to be civil rights scholars to know that there is no idyllic utopia there for us.”
― Ezekiel Kweku
“Is this why I didn’t get the job? Is this why my lease application was denied? Is this why I got into college? Is this why this person keeps following me around the grocery store? And when you ask, you’re looked at like you’re crazy, met with denial — because it’s always plausible, deniable.”
― Bijan Stephen
“Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person ten times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates
“When we blame private prejudice, suburban snobbishness, and black poverty for contemporary segregation, we not only whitewash our own history but avoid considering whether new policies might instead promote an integrated community.”
― Economic Policy Institute
“The conundrum of the twenty-first (century) is that with the best intentions of color blindness, and laws passed in this spirit, we still carry instincts and reactions inherited from our environments and embedded in our being below the level of conscious decision. There is a color line in our heads, and while we could see its effects we couldn’t name it until now. But john powell is also steeped in a new science of “implicit bias,” which gives us a way, finally, even to address this head on. It reveals a challenge that is human in nature, though it can be supported and hastened by policies to create new experiences, which over time create new instincts and lay chemical and physical pathways. This is a helpfully unromantic way to think about what we mean when we aspire, longingly, to a lasting change of heart. And john powell and others are bringing training methodologies based on the new science to city governments and police forces and schools. What we’re finding now in the last 30 years is that much of the work, in terms of our cognitive and emotional response to the world, happens at the unconscious level.”
― Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living