Janet Mock Quotes

If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

It's more dangerous to be black in America...If you are a normal white American, the truth is you don't understand being black in America, and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk in a way that you have to be corrected.

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?

I think it's impossible to be a young black male from the South, born to an era I was born in, and not have a clear sense of what race really means in the country.

I think we have come to a place in black America, sadly from my point of view, where we have once again begun to rely on our history of victimization as our primary source of power to wield within society.

Part of what our problem as blacks in America is that we don't claim that. Partly, you see, because of the linguistic environment in which we live.

I came in the gate as an African-American poor kid wanting to be a neurosurgeon but - with American life and the places I was put due to American history and laws and the oppression of black people - I had to make it work in other ways.

I was fortunate to be raised in Seattle, which was amazing, but that doesn't take away from the fact I was still a black kid growing up in America.

Speaking as a black person, welfare is the worst thing that's ever happened to us.

When I think of the trials and tribulations that black men go through in America and that black artists went through, I feel very privileged.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

Sometimes I wonder if I got lulled into not wanting things because I grew up black in this country.

White America is tortured by black America's failure to thrive, and all that guilt and anxiety has only gotten worse as a substantial quota of white America loses its own footing in the middle class and plunges into the rough country of joblessness, hopelessness, and government dependency.

While all of us have been impoverished spiritually by this stigma upon our nation, minority groups of color such as the Blacks, the American Indians, and the Mexican-Americans have borne the brunt of this malady

White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White society created it; white institutions maintain it; and white society condones it.

I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It's harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.

You can do pretty much anything you want to do in America as a black, including become president. Still, the legacy of our victimization, of our suffering and exclusion from the mainstream of American life, has left its mark.

I'm not familiar particularly with Hillary Clinton's neighborhood, but I wish people were a little bit more curious about what we call privilege and about why it's there. Black people in this country have no choice but to be curious. We have to know. I wish folks would do a little bit more investigation.

I don't think there is enough understanding of how diverse black America actually is.

America isn't made for the black man.

This industry's hard. The world is hard. Being young and black is tough.

Police violence is the tip of the iceberg when it relates to the conditions overall of black people across the globe.

As a black man in America, I have lived the truth.

I grew up poor, black, and working class.

Every black man in Chicago walks through the world differently, and I think what young black boys do is observe, and that's what gives them their road map.