Quotes About Injustice

In fifth grade, we did 10 minutes on slavery and 40 minutes on Abraham Lincoln, and in 10th grade you might do 10 minutes on the civil rights era and 40 minutes on Martin Luther King, and that's it.

There are not grades of racism. There's racism.

Macklemore gets a Grammy over Kendrick Lamar. I still can't get over that. But again, it's not Macklemore's fault. It's the way of the country.

My father didn't know his last name. My father got his last name from his grandfather, and his grandfather got it from his grandfather who got it from the slavemaster.

My grandmother was a sharecropper. That wasn't even that long ago! My grandma was a sharecropper.

And I feel like, as a black man within black culture, I know very well firsthand - as do my parents and my grandparents and great-grandparents - we're used to things not going our way.

Racism is felt the most definitely in grassroots football.

Countless black citizens in the South couldn't vote. They were second-class citizens from cradle to grave. The discrimination was terrible, brutal.

Hip-hop was born of people who did not have a voice. They were not heard. And those people exist and are a part of a framework of life... as long as that's true, people will gravitate to hip-hop.

The laws in this city are clearly racist. All laws are racist. The law of gravity is racist.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

There has always been a great deal of racism in the U.S. before and after Obama.

We shouldn't be profiting from our students who are drowning in debt while giving a great deal to the banks. That's just wrong.

There are a lot of great people everywhere. And there are also a lot of not so great people.

What we need to do is break the financial community's grip on society.

On Thanksgiving Night, 1942, when I was fifteen years old, white racists burned our house to the ground.

You learn that the only way to get rock-star power as a girl is to be a groupie and bare your breasts and get chosen for the night. We learn that the only way to get anywhere is through men. And it's a lie.

It is ridiculous to say that Sacco and Vanzetti are being railroaded to the chair. The situation is much worse than that. This is a thing done cold-bloodedly and with deliberation. But care and deliberation do not guarantee justice.

The only crime I'm guilty of is being a young black woman.

The question shouldn't be 'Are we guilty about our colonial past;' it should be 'Why aren't we more guilty about our corporate present'?

The problem of gun violence goes beyond the countless demographic differences between people.

When I speak out against the guns or against the big corporations, some of my friends say, 'Oh Yoko, be careful. These people have all the power.' But, you know, most people don't speak out because they are frightened.

I never had the guts to go to Calais. I didn't see for myself the conditions people were living in, or hear their stories firsthand. That doesn't sit well with my conscience.

A generation of men really built the NFL and gave guys like me a shot, and a lot of these guys are left out in the cold by the league and forgotten.