Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best DeRay Mckesson Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the DeRay Mckesson Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If City Hall started projecting swastikas, no one would say ‘You know what? Free speech.’ People would say that is wrong.
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Being mayor is about offering a vision for the city, putting the right people in the right place, and executing that vision.
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I’m not desensitized to death.
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Baltimore is a city of possibility, and we’ve got to challenge the traditional pathways of politics and politicians who lay those paths.
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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.
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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.
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I think about freedom as not only as the absence of oppression but also the presence of justice and joy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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People are not as imaginative as they think they are.
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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.
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The student newspapers are as important to me as the ‘New York Times.’
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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.
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Justice that is not rooted in equity, in social welfare, and in community is not justice at all.
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I’m not ashamed to be gay.
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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.
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Expressing and loving myself is often so much more complex than ‘out’ affords me.
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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.
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