Quotes About Injustice

Racism is a very insidious thing. It's dangerous to the psyche, to mind and body. It erodes the self-confidence. And I don't know how we get through it.

I really feel that I've been unjustly exorcised from the story of psychedelic music.

There has always been a conscious effort to destroy any upliftment of the black race, whether that be physically, mentally, psychologically, morally, culturally, or economically.

Public crucifixion is no fun.

The Chinese people have been forced to forget the Tiananmen massacre. There has been no public debate about the event, no official apology. The media aren't allowed to mention it. Still today people are being persecuted and imprisoned for disseminating information about it.

I was motivated to go into public life because of the great chasm that exists between justice and injustice in our country. Nowhere is that divide greater than in America's cities.

Often, I'm up against both - position and money power. And yes, a system that needs to be more 'woman-friendly.' I believe these experiences will probably give birth to a more public life, where I can address the issues of women that need help in being heard, for I have understood what it is to be in that position.

Having grown up in a Black neighborhood, gone to a segregated Black public school that was overcrowded and underfunded, watched my neighbors be displaced when rents went up and they couldn't afford to pay them - all this shaped my career.

I hate the fact that public schools like the one I went to have fantastic sports facilities, and state schools don't. That's not fair. That's outrageous.

As I graduated from public schools and started working in newsrooms, I told myself that I am only the 'illegal' that my own country has not bothered to get to know.

I didn't like my hair and makeup one time on a photo shoot, and my publicist told me, 'You should just be happy with it - they haven't had a black girl on the cover since forever.' She's no longer my publicist.

I think it's important for black people in general to be aware of what's going on and do what you got to work around it. Not bow down to it publicly.

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.

Puerto Rico's participation per capita in the armed forces is more than most states, yet they can't vote for their commander in chief.

I don't think it's fair that you can say I'm not a Puerto Rican fighter because I wasn't born in Puerto Rico, when my blood is Puerto Rican.

The police pull up in back of my car and run my plates - they don't see you as you are; they see you through a racialized negative gaze. I think the best thing is not to internalize it too much, or it'll make you crazy because you know it's going to happen again.

They pulled Resurrection out of the theatres, so it was running in New York and I was nominated for the Oscar and there was no ad in the newspapers to say it was running. So it was literally killed.

Students were pulled aside to spend more time in art class, and I wasn't one of them.

Most people who are not of color, their parents didn't need to tell them how to act around police or what to do if they ever got pulled over. Never, not once. We are taught that in the black neighborhoods. I've been profiled and pulled over, so it's not like I don't know.

I've been pulled over with four hoopers in the car before and we've all been taken out and searched because we were black riding in a white neighborhood.

If you are a black person growing up in America, chances are pretty good that you have experienced the police pulling you over in front of your mother's house because you 'had a headlight out.'

We crime novelists have a great pulpit. We write about justice and about correcting injustice.

I tend to write two stories every day, five days a week. It's a real grind. But it also allows me to really try to have my finger on the pulse of injustice in America.

If you're able to put your knee on someone's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, you have no heart. You have no pulse. If you can smile and put your hands in your pocket and the ones that are around you that didn't do anything, are not human either.