Top 50 DeRay Mckesson Quotes

When I tweet, I’m mostly preaching to the choir.

It is not a new tactic for people to use any avenue they can to silence black activists.

Some people are more interested in fighting than winning.

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.

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.

Protest is political. It is as political as what our conception of America is.

It will always be important that people continue to push on the system from the outside. It will also be important that people make the changes that we know are necessary on the inside.

I think about freedom as not only as the absence of oppression but also the presence of justice and joy.

People are not as imaginative as they think they are.

I take statements that portray untrue statements about me seriously.

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.

Baltimore is a city of possibility, and we’ve got to challenge the traditional pathways of politics and politicians who lay those paths.

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.

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 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.

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.

Black people have always been more than our pain. The joy is so much a part of how we have survived and thrived.

Being mayor is about offering a vision for the city, putting the right people in the right place, and executing that vision.

Politics is compromise, by its very nature. But we never compromise on our values and beliefs.

I actually get very little phone calls. I get way more tweets and texts. My phone rarely rings.

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.

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 am mindful that the goal of protest is not more protest, but the goal of protest is change.

There is nothing romantic about teargas. Or smoke bombs or rubber bullets or sound cannons.

I’ve never been a surrogate for Bernie, Hillary, or the DNC.

The arts scene in Baltimore is really rich and very vibrant. It’s one of the untold stories of the city.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

I have a platform, and I can help. I can be in spaces that reporters will never be in because I’m a protester.

Music helps shape the way people think about the world and act in the world.

I wasn’t a very good writer before college. I don’t think I was a very good reader.

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.

I grew up in a world of Officer Friendly. It was just the image I had.

People are more afraid of black unity than black rage.

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.

Sometimes, the hate that I endure is not necessarily about me but about the space I’m in.

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.

So many of us don’t know what we want; we just know we don’t want what we have. We spend 99% of the time talking about how bad it is, but only 1% of the time talking about how we can do something about it.

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?

I think about Twitter as the friend that’s always awake. It’s why I tweet so much.

My father and mother deeply loved me and my sister.

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.

I’m not a politician. I’m somebody who knows the world can be better, and I’m willing to fight for it.

I’m not desensitized to death.

If City Hall started projecting swastikas, no one would say ‘You know what? Free speech.’ People would say that is wrong.

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.