Quotes from David Pilgrim

After sitting through my lecture on white supremacy—its origins, reach, and consequences—one of my students said to me, "I couldn't have taken another minute of that." I said, "Good, then it was the right amount."

Americans like happy history—narratives that make us look smart, brave, and exceptional. We want a history that has been cherry-picked, one that ignores our mistreatment of the weak and disfavored—a history that can be celebrated at picnics, parades, and in smug conversations. This approach to history is neither honest nor mature.

At the bottom of all the political pontificating is a simple question: Will we be the city upon the hill or a nation of tribalistic assholes?

Compassion is not pity, not even empathetic pity. There is arrogance and haughty pride in pitying others. Compassion is when we are confronted with another's suffering and we suffer with them. Their pain is ours. We are motivated to relieve their suffering. When we feel true compassion we help those who suffer, not as a cathartic release, but because it breaks our heart that they are hurting. I have not always known or believed these things, but I am thankful that I do now.

Do not tell someone you love them, and then vote for someone who will hurt them.

For fourteen years, Martin Luther King, Jr. lived in the valley of the shadow of death. He was stoned. He was stabbed. His home was bombed. He did important work despite the knowledge that people plotted his death. He sacrificed his safety, not his life. Stop saying that he gave his life, offered himself as a sacrifice. That is a lie. He was murdered.

Funneling anger is risky business. Anger is a powerful fuel, and one could argue that much social change has resulted in no small part because of angry voices. In my half century of living, however, I have seen too many activists become frustrated and worn out—made callous by failed attempts to make change, with their idealistic passion devolving into seething anger, or worse, thick hatred.

Hate the injustice not the unjust man, even though that shit is hard.

I am blessed to travel this country to talk about racism. Yes, its a blessing, but in every place someone says, 'If you stop talking about race, racism will go away.' That doesn't even make stupid sense. The reality is that we talk about race all the time, in corridors, in offices, at ballgames, but we do not often talk about it in places where our ideas are challenged."

I am glad to see so many young people thinking about social justice. I have been woke since the doctor slapped my ass.

Most politicians have some con artist in them, but worse is the con artist who has some politician in him.

No one is asking police officers to beat white protestors like they beat us. We want them to not beat us like they don't beat them

Stand on the shoulders of others, not their throats, heads, and backs.

Standing on someone you knocked down does not make you taller.

The browning of America worries the weak and the wicked. Walls and fences will not keep this country white. Look at me: it is obvious that someone hopped a fence.

You can keep me out of Harvard, but you cannot keep me uneducated. As long as there are books to read, I control my education. We will fight to dismantle the barriers in higher education, but we own the education of our minds.

You don't have to be black, brown, red, or yellow to do good research about the experiences of people of color. You don't have to fabricate a racial/ethnic identity to be a researcher--or even an activist. Knowledge belongs to all of us. Activism belongs to all of us. Stop centering yourselves in the lived experiences of people of color. Just do the work that needs to be done.

Young visitors to the museum ask me, "What was it like to live during the civil rights struggle?" I gently tell them that we are living during the civil rights struggle. -David Pilgrim

I want it said loudly and clearly that we can define racism in many ways, but it is, in my opinion, intellectually disingenuous to define it in a way that trivializes the role that racial hatred plays. Certainly, not all racism is hate-driven, but to ignore the connection between racial hate and racism is to reduce the concept of racism to a useless theoretical abstraction.