Marginalized Voices Quotes

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

What I've become good at is bringing things that aren't necessarily mainstream to the mainstream.

My take is that there's two ways to approach history. You sit in your armchair and you watch it on the news and you return to your PlayStation. Or you get out in the streets and you make it. Like, when those Supreme Court justices, you know, legalize desegregation, it wasn't due to their infinite wisdom. It's because people whose names you do not read about in history books, people whose faces you will never see, were the ones who struggled and sacrificed, sometimes gave their lives, to make this country a more equal one. When, it's like those people don't make history, it's us.

At every turn when there has been an imbalance of power, the truth questioned, or our beliefs and values distorted, the change required to restore our nation has always come from the bottom up from our people.

If we don't center the voices of marginalized people, we're doing the wrong work.

I suggest that Black feminist thought consists of specialised knowledge created by African-American women which clarifies a standpoint of and for Black women. In other words, Black feminist thought encompasses theoretical interpretations of Black women's reality by those who live it.

My story is one of millions, and the others aren't often told.

I don't feel drawn to lightness, I need something more. I feel that - oh, I hate saying this, it sounds so wanky - but I feel a real urge to give voices to people we don't usually hear from in real life.

The DREAMers are the safe ones, right? It's okay to advocate for the DREAMers because they're the English-speaking, college-educated ones, right? It's so interesting that I set out to document DREAMers, but what I ended up doing was actually documenting the experience of, the reality and truth of, the moms and the parents.

The history handed down to us is what white men did in the daytime.

Media gatekeepers - editors, publishers, film studios and the like - need to begin investing in talent behind the scenes, developing and resourcing marginalized voices to tell their own stories. At the end of the day, it's about the story and what will enable the audience to truly see, understand, and know the life and times of the subject.

The people we need to hear from most are the ones who make themselves heard least - except, of course, on Election Day.

Primarily I see myself as so much more than a rapper. I really believe I am the voice for a lot of people who don't have that microphone or who can't rap.

When marginalized people gain voice and center their own experiences, things begin changing. And we see this in all kinds of grassroots movements.

Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing.

There is something to be said about laying bare the vocabulary of the aristocratic measure, right? There's something to be said about allowing the powerless to tell their own story.

The question is, how do you stop the power elite from doing as much damage to you as possible? That comes through movements. It's not our job to take power. You could argue that the most powerful political figure in April of 1968 was Martin Luther King. And we know Johnson was terrified of him. We have to accept that all of the true correctives to American democracy came through these movements that never achieved formal political power and yet frightened the political establishment enough to respond.

I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.

When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think.

I think increasingly we want to read the history that wasn't written by the victors.

I may have no idea what I'm talking about," I said, a little ticked off now. "But we're all a part of a minority waiting for a majority to pull their heads out of their asses.

The thing about hip-hop is that it's from the underground, ideas from the underbelly, from people who have mostly been locked out, who have not been recognized.

The reason you write something that is exciting and visceral is to force people to hear what you have to say, especially if you're in any kind of marginalized community where people don't want to listen. You have to come up with tricks to make them listen.

Hip-hop was born of people who did not have a voice. They were not heard. And those people exist and are a part of a framework of life... as long as that's true, people will gravitate to hip-hop.

That's what independent filmmaking does: it gives the underdog a voice, a shot.