Opal Tometi Quotes

There's a lot of talk now about the PC police, and 'why is everything bad?' It isn't. What it is, is that marginalized and oppressed people who have never had a soapbox, who have never been given a microphone, suddenly have a microphone.

We need more leaders speaking up for minority groups who have been marginalized and attacked.

It's always the minorities who aren't a part of the mainstream who define what the limits... of the majority are going to be.

Justice often means taking power from some who have it and giving it to some who do not.

Create power for the powerless.

Oppression costs the oppressor too much if the oppressed stand up and protest.

I think it was a good and necessary thing that the American upper class diversified, and that more African-Americans and Jews and Catholics (like myself) and women now share privileges and powers once reserved for Protestant white men.

We must make sure #MeToo breaks the race, class, gender, and faith lines that make it so hard for marginalized people to be heard.

There are people in our country, in our communities who are being marginalized and discriminated against every single day. I fight for them.

It is important to me to keep fighting for the rights of those who cannot.

I'm trying to appeal to the disenfranchised everybody, not just specifically gay.

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

Truth is on the side of the oppressed.

Fault lines run along color lines in American public life, and the women's movement is no exception. Over the years, feminism has become more inclusive but there is still hard work to be done to include LGBT women and communities of color.

While everyone's experience of oppression is different and complicated and often overlapping, I really believe that if you have privilege, you need to learn as much as you can about the world beyond yourself.

Our party has always been the voice of the powerless and the voiceless.

Each one of our ideas should benefit the people with less power than us.

Speak up for the people that nobody speaks for.

Keeping people on the margins of cultural, social and political life constitutes in many nations one of the most glaring injustices of our time.

The work does not end with the abolition of slavery but only begins.

... a legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, yellow, red, and white women—with men relating to that the best they can.

Ted Kennedy’s life’s work was not to champion those with wealth or power or special connections. It was to give a voice to those who were not heard, to add a rung to the ladder of opportunity, to make real the dream of our founding.

Those of us with power must learn to listen more and talk less; those without power must learn to talk more an listen less.

If any group wants to not be disenfranchised, then understanding that there's going to be a learning curve for people who have disenfranchised them is important.

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.