Mikie Sherrill Quotes

I'm not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class.

In my own view, the life expectancy of Native Americans in the United States is one of the really great moral crises that we face.

'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?

The role model approach to social change is no substitute for challenging unjust employment practices, educational policies and housing.

The fundamental driving force for me is to create a change in the world we live in... It is about exploitation, plundering and degradation. I have a small possibility to participate in the resistance. Most of the things that I do are part of a resistance, a form of solidarity work.

Does being practical mean we prop up a legal system that's unfair, that bears its weight down on black men and black women, and by extension if you are Hispanic or indigenous or poor? Does being practical mean you don't say to the American people you deserve better than you're getting? That's not the practical we want.

We're criminalizing economic inability to stay out of the system. Women get penalized more than men for the same crime; blacks get penalized more than whites for the same crime. We need to bring out more into the light, because it's not fair... I applaud Colin Kaepernick for speaking out.

When we're talking about slavery... we're really talking about the web of relationships that exists between whites and blacks from 1619 to 1865 to now.

God blessed us with all this money, so why not take the money and put it into my brother's case? Talk about social and racial injustice in our country, and mass incarceration in our country?

That happens to a lot of couples. I understand the black history in this country, and regret it, I wish it hadn't happened. See, I also know that it hasn't happened to African-Americans alive today. There isn't one African-American alive today who's treated as three-fifths of a person like it was in the past.

Black people in America have come from slavery to other forms of being oppressed and there are some things that come with that - some pain and anger that come with that and we as black people have to deal with it to heal that. White people have to understand it and have some compassion toward it.

You can't tackle climate change until you tackle poverty.

We have to bridge and join our struggles and understand how we can't fight violence against women without looking at racism, we can't fight violence against women without looking at economic deprivation or climate change. All these struggles are interconnected.

More often than not, people who are poor... are right where they should be.

Can we first take care of our 'brown lives matter' in India and then worry about the U.S.? I find it bizarre that racism that is done so far away from home it is creating such an uproar. Look at the kind of racism people who are dark skinned in our country have to face.

The harsh fact of the matter is that this nation has not remotely come to grips with how many of its laws are rooted in slavery and bigoted oppression. After the Civil War, the United States never said, 'Let's examine every law and policy and system and structure we have to evaluate whether or not they were created as a tools of oppression.'

Effectively transcending and conquering the legacies of enchainment, impoverishment and racial denigration continue to elude us. Residual elements of the plantation-based past continue to shape our societies and determine their trajectories.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, in general, by putting this idea out there that the one percent is leeching off the 99 percent, is making a new discussion, making people figure out how to withhold their labor and come and put their issues on the table with the ruling class all over the country and all over the world.

I feel like we haven't dealt with the ghosts of America's past, and the way to deal with it is to confront it, so every time people see me, I want them to be reminded and to confront that ghost.

I mean we just simply can't stand for the systemic racism, social injustice and police brutality against the black community anymore. And it's really about standing up for what's right versus what's wrong.

Systemically, there hasn't been an oppression more overt and long-lasting than economic oppression against black people and minorities in this country.

Black Lives Matter is really an affirmation for our people. It's a love note for our people, but it's also a demand. We know that the system was not designed for justice for us.

The history of blackness is also a history of erasure.

We're poor black kids from Akron, Ohio. When you tell stories about people like us, sometimes it's going to be considered a social-impact story.

You need money to have advocacy in America. People that don't have money don't have advocacy.