Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A cacophony of whispers is also noise. There are many ways to be heard, and there are many ways to be visible. There are many ways to be seen.
Twitter is half me trying to live in the world and half me processing and sharing the world. I share a lot, and some of that is to keep me honest.
I am excited to return to city schools... and to continue doing the work to ensure that every child in Baltimore City receives a world-class education.
People like to act like we don't have a legacy of racism here. I think people get really uncomfortable with it. We know that we can't change it unless we address that.
Not only do we need to focus on classrooms, but adult literacy is a huge issue in historically marginalized communities. That's a crisis, and it's one that you can't see.
I'm a black, gay man, and I should be able to live in a world where I'm able to live in the complexity of my identity in a way that is safe and secure, like everyone else.
I just couldn't believe that the police would fire tear gas into what had been a peaceful protest. I was running around, face burning, and nothing I saw looked like America to me.
The activism of marginalized people often comes with visibility and being heard. Which can lead people to believe that recognition and awareness is the actual end point. And it is not.
I am not naive enough to believe that voting is the only way to bring about transformational change, just as I know that protest alone is not the sole solution to the challenges we face.
It is one thing to talk about fundraising and another to do it as a candidate, and I have learned so much about how much money it costs to run a campaign and what it means to raise money.
Laws on hate speech and hate crimes do important work in a world that has been rooted in racism and bigotry since the inception of this country, which was not founded on ideals of justice.
I have a big following on Twitter, and Twitter has been invaluable for mobilizing and quickly sharing information. But I'm not really sure that people are learning deep content on Twitter.
I think my imagination about jobs was pretty limited. There were so few jobs that I actually saw people who looked like me in, that I imagined myself in, that I think I just stopped imagining.
Baltimore is a beautiful city. I started doing a lot of community organizing back in 1999 and met so many great people in neighborhoods all across the city. And that was an invaluable experience.
It's important that people press from the outside. It's important that people are able to make change from the inside. Both of those things are important. Protest is fundamentally a political act.
If anything, any success that I have ever experienced has been because people who didn't have to care about me did, and they pushed me to see things in myself that I did not see in myself at the time.
I think that Silicon Valley and technology can play a huge role in redefining what community looks like and how people come together and what authentic relationships look like, but that is not only their burden.
I am running to be the 50th mayor of Baltimore in order to usher our city into an era where the government is accountable to its people and is aggressively innovative in how it identifies and solves its problems.
I've worked in two public school districts, Minneapolis and Baltimore, one as a senior leader. And while we might not always have agreed with the union, and we might have had deep differences, they came to the table.
It's important to acknowledge the danger when we provide an academic venue for racism. It's interesting to hear people push the, quote, 'free speech' narrative in this way. They deny the speech of the people who disagree.
The first time I was ever impressed with Patagonia as a brand was when they released the 'Don't Buy This Jacket' campaign. That campaign highlighted their understanding of their role in a larger environmental justice space.
People often confuse visibility with a lot of other things. Sometimes I become a proxy for things that just aren't true about me. People will say, 'DeRay got millions of dollars in grants.' That's just not true... I'm broke.
I was a teacher. I also worked at Harlem Children's Zone. I moved back to Baltimore and opened up an after-school, out-of-school program on the west side and then worked in two public school districts, in Baltimore and Minneapolis.
When Trump says, 'Make America great again,' he is referencing an era when people were singled out and harmed because of their race and religious beliefs, and when violent enforcement of Jim Crow masqueraded as the will of the people.
I am often asked what it is like to be on the 'front line.' But I do not use the term 'front line' to describe us, the protesters. Because everywhere in America, wherever we are, our blackness puts us in close proximity to police violence.
We question these issues of race and struggle and white privilege because we know that those issues are real and because those issues have real implications in black communities. And white supremacy is not only dangerous, but it is deadly.
I will never forget the first time I was teargassed or the night I hid under my steering wheel as the SWAT vehicle drove down a residential street. I will never forget that it was illegal - in St Louis, in the fall of 2014 - to stand still.
I've seen optimism because I grew up in communities of recovery where people put their lives back together and find tomorrows that they didn't think would be there. That fundamentally changed my life and is so much of where my hope comes from.
Bowdoin was the first place that I fell in love with. When I visited, I just had never been to a place with that many resources and that much access to information. That was stuff that you saw in movies. I didn't know that existed in real life.
A lot of organizers are trying to figure out how do we create entrances for people so they can be involved in the work in a way that makes them feel is aligned to the things they're interested in and not the things the organizer is interested in?
When our response to all trauma is to call the police, then that gets us into a cycle of perpetuating trauma. Mental health trauma is different from somebody breaking into a store. Those are not the same things, and our response has to be different.
So much of what people think about when they think about health is primary care, but health is so much more than that. Health is about the decisions you make everyday. It's about where you sleep. It's about are you exercising, it's about what you eat.
When I reflect on the Colbert interview, it moved so quickly that what we didn't do was define white privilege, and I wish we had done that. White privilege is the benefit resulting from white being seen as the standard, regardless of gender and income.
Everybody has told the story of black people in struggle except black people. The black people in the struggle haven't had the means to tell the story historically. There were a million slaves, but you see very few slave narratives. And that is intentional.
When I think about protest, I worry so much that people think about it only as standing in the streets. And I say that as someone who has been standing in the streets of cities across the country - but at the root of it is this idea of telling the truth in public.
There will always be a rule. There will be people who break the rules. There will be consequences. We fundamentally think these things will be true for a time. The question becomes, What are the consequences? Who enforces the consequences? What are the worst consequences?
I think people who are not from here think the Inner Harbor is the only center for culture or fun in the city, and there's so much more to Baltimore. The Harbor's a beautiful place, but there are so many gems embedded in other communities that don't get as much visibility.
If you close your eyes and think about where you feel the most safe, you're probably not going to tell me it's in a room full of police. You feel safe where you're around people that love you, when you have food and shelter, when you're being pushed to be your best self and learn.
There are people who have demonstrated their willingness to challenge systems and structures, and then when it comes to elections, some of those same people - I don't know where their fight went. What's interesting to me is to see people lose the revolution when it comes to elections.
I think about all of my students who were math-phobic, who didn't believe they could learn math, who didn't understand, who didn't think they were smart enough, and by the end, they understood that they already had the gifts, and my job was to help them access them, and I believe that.
I think the reality is that there's a role for everybody to play in the work of social justice and that we have to organize everybody. That means that Silicon Valley has to be organized, the fashion industry has to be organized, the formerly incarcerated have to be organized, the teachers.
Leadership means making sure that people are adequately skilled, making sure people are earning a living wage, making sure people have access to resources. That's not sexy, it doesn't sound great at a rally or a forum, but that is actually the work that it will take to change cities. We know that.
Trump wants to take us back to a time when people like him could abuse others with little to no consequence, when people like him could exploit the labor of others to build vast amounts of wealth, when people like him could create public policy that specifically benefited them while suppressing the rights and social mobility of others.
The police, at their best, do three things; they prevent crime, they respond to crime, and they solve crime. In all three of those buckets, they need the trust of the community to do it, so I believe that if we restore the trust that we will change the way police are experiencing communities and ways that will preserve life and make everyone safer.
I don't want to live in a world where Donald Trump is the President. He is not doing anything in Baltimore, but I am dedicated to using whatever platform I have to make sure that he is not the President. This is not simply a disagreement about ideas. It's a disagreement about values, and the values that he espouses are values of bigotry and hate, and that isn't OK.