Margot Lee Shetterly Quotes

I want the white people to understand my people.

I have lived a life that has been beautiful and painful at some moments. But I am convinced others can learn how to control a certain kind of rage that bubbles up in many Americans, particularly, but not limited to, women, blacks, and other minorities.

I don't know that white people need to be 'allies' so much as understand that any black struggle in America is ultimately a struggle for the large country. 'Ally' presumes a kind of distance that I am not sure exists.

Even people who say that black people are minorities, there are a billion black people in the world. A billion white people. What part of that is a minority? If you separate yourself, then maybe. But I see black people as one man. When I see people beaten on the streets of America, that hurts me. I feel that.

I love being black in America, and especially being black in Hollywood.

Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it's like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can't really speak on it, because I wasn't there. I don't feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.

Black people have been qualified to be president for hundreds of years. George Washington Carver could have been president. I could go on with a list of black men that were qualified to be the president of the United States. So the Obama victory is progress for white people.

I've always been a fan of issues around race and racialism, and I've loved playing with it. People act as though it isn't an issue, but it's a recurring theme in our lives globally.

White folks, no matter how well-meaning or open-minded, have no true idea what it's like to be black in America. That's not a slam against white people or an accusation of latent bigotry. But the fact is that we all live in an Anglo-dominated society.

Race prejudice can't be talked down, it must be lived down.

I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society.

Black history isn't a separate history. This is all of our history, this is American history, and we need to understand that. It has such an impact on kids and their values and how they view black people.

I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.

What I know about this world is that white people will take care of themselves. And what I have learned is that if you are where they are on an equal basis, they cannot take care of themselves without taking care of you.

Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.

There's drama in everything. That's why I love movies. Like 'Welcome to the Dollhouse.' I'm a 350-pound black man, and I could understand what it was like to be a little white girl.

I make films about black women and it doesn't mean that you can't see them as a black man, doesn't mean that he can't see them as a white man or she can't see them as a white woman.

I, for one, would think both about how far we have come as a country and how much further we need to go to erase racism and discrimination from our society.

The only part of my mother's experience that still gets to me is the way she and people like her were looked down upon for asking America to be America, for asking for full and equal participation in our democracy.

I don't think any of us that are white can ever fully understand what it's like to be a black person in America today.

People don't realize how black people, minorities, women as well, all their lives, they have had to make the effort to understand everybody else. All my life, I've known American culture very well. I probably know American literature more than the average American.

The growth of race relations management, diversity training and 'promoting good relations' has come at a cost. We are more sensitized to racism, yet far less confident in talking to each other as human beings with similar hopes, problems and aspirations.

The way you start to break down systemic racism is to start building individual relationships with people who are not like you.

My wish is to humanize history.

The protests and pain over the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown had me wondering if we can ever experience the world as others do. For no matter how disputed the circumstances of both cases, many people see what happened in black and white.