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Bob Marley performed the 'One Love Peace' concert in Jamaica with the two different warring political sides. There's always been that in black music and culture in general. It's no surprise because black music is such a reflection of what's going on in black life. It's not unusual for hip-hop.
Oct 1, 2025
I don't trust white critics' judgment about most things that deal with black life, particularly when a black person is the creator.
Black lives, of course, matter. I spent 50 years of my life fighting for civil rights and for dignity, but if you don't want me to be here, that's OK. I don't want to out-scream people.
I belong to a bowling team with black and Latino coworkers. And when we get together and we talk about politics - I'm almost quoting him - he said, we don't talk about Black Lives Matters. We talk about what matters to our families. We talk about jobs, and we talk about the fate of the country. That is America, and you can reach those people.
Bill Clinton did everything in opposition to Black Lives Matter and the things that animate the existence of the Democrat Party today.
If I talk to rural people where I live - mostly Hispanic but also poor white - they're not sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Our society is driven today by so much ethnic discord. We have Black Lives Matter, which I praise and celebrate. We have the demagogues stereotyping Muslims and resurrecting racist stereotypes they used to visit on us. The larger goal is to show that we are all the same, we all come from Africa, and we all have the same larger family tree. It's about the fundamental unity of the human community.
Yet civil rights issues are very much on the front burner in South Carolina between the Black Lives Matter movement and police shootings.
I think this ['March']is essential reading to understand the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it's also essential reading for the Black Lives Matter movement, so that they understand the political context that they're engaging in.
I am of the generation of segregation. Black Lives Matter is post. I said today, and I will say all the time, "If Nina [Simone] were here, she'd have her Black Lives Matter [T-shirt] on." I think they're great kids. They don't need me or anybody else to tell them what to do.
That's not to say that some of the new media is not advantageous. You can reach lots of folks with what Black Lives Matter is doing, mobilizing people. God bless them.
By the end of the documentary [ '13th'], you really understand what prison is, what the prison industrial complex is, where this whole Black Lives Matter movement comes from, the history of resistance, the history of how politicians have used criminality over the decades for a particular political gain. It's to give people an understanding of it so they can make their own decisions about how they want to be in the world.
I think ['March'] is not just for the Black Lives Matter movement. It's for everyone. We all have to understand what happened then, so we can understand what's happening now.
Hate speech it seems to be is been defined by the political left as anything we don't like, anything that violates social justice doctrines, feminism, Black Lives Matter kind of ideology. It is not something that I have ever heard particularly effectively defined.
That's why Black Lives Matter thinks I'm so great. The fact of the matter is that everything is consciousness. This conversation is important.
The Black Lives Matter movement, the various Occupy movements in Spain and the rest of Europe, in this country, and elsewhere serve as an example of what can be done, and how strong the voices for positive change and truly democratic progress can be.
The national conversation around white entitlement, around institutionalized racism, the Black Lives Matter movement, I think, came about in large part because of the widening and broadening of our understanding of inequality. That conversation was begun by Occupy.
The efforts of Black Lives Matter to bring attention to the all-too-frequent instances of unjustified violence being used by policemen may not be paying off as quickly as some might hope.
We want to make sure people know deeply about the trans community and deeply about Black Lives Matter so that people can act in solidarity.
There's still a place for marching for instance with the Black Lives Matter movement, we've seen the importance of causing a scene, being on the streets and making your demands and your voice heard.
You know, I had a new kind of thought on Black Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter thing. And the best way to explain it is if we're all sitting around at a table having dinner, and everybody gets pie except for you and you say, my pie matters, I don't have pie, and everybody at the table looks at you and says, I know, all pie matters, it shows that the people at the table aren't really listening.
When you say black lives matter, that's inherently racist.
What the Black lives matter movement is doing is they are making it personal. They are making it hash tagged, exposing the racial injustice that continues to haunt our country in a way that you can't ignore. There is power in injustice becoming personal.
If you understand the Black Lives Matter movement, there's no central leadership of the movement. This is an organic, grassroots movement all around America.
When I'm talking to people, I find myself quoting the three organizing rules of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter was initiated by three young women, and too few people know that. But, anyway, the first one is lead with love. The second is low ego, high impact. The third is move with the speed of trust. I must say those make me feel very hopeful for the future.
Black Lives Matter is the ultimate divisive movement.
Historically it has been a touchy subject, especially in the south where I am from, people don't really talk about it. If they do talk about it, it is often talked about negatively. Nowadays in light of the Black Lives Matter movement I think people should pay attention to these lives also. I think the Black community will really embrace the film [Moonlight]. It is about us. It is real.
BLM (Black Lives Matter) is pathetic! Obama you are pathetic! Everyone should be locked behind bars like animals!
Ninety-plus percent of police/community relations is simply wonderful - where people obey the law, don't resist arrest, don't attack cops and don't threaten lives, everyone gets along just fine. When the president [Barack Obama] constantly sides with the worst thugs out there and with the Black Lives Matter terrorists, and the media lies constantly, we the people better get to the truth ASAP.
I think the way the country has changed in part because of the presidency of Barack Obama, I think in part because of what we`ve - the violence that we have seen on our cell phones and our TV sets over the last couple of years. I think Black Lives Matter has helped to force these issues. Women like Sabrina Fulton. We`re having a different conversation in this country right now about race and what it means to really understand your experience is and my experience is.
New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.
I'm trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that can't be contained by life: Asian life, European life, certainly black life. My plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal - things humans have written about since the beginning of time.
If I talk to black students on campus, they're not sympathetic to the people who are not sympathetic with [Black Lives Matter movement]. The fact that you want to argue rather than find some common ground, I think, has gotten a lot worse in the last years.
Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives matter. Hispanic lives matter. That's anti-American and it's racist.
There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.
Black life is ambiguous, and a kaleidoscope of meanings, rich, multi-sided . . . we have frozen our vision in figures that caricature, at best the complexity of our lives and leave the real artistic chore of interpretation unfinished.
Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was. And the Democrat Party and the black civil rights allies are partners in this genocide.
Like books and black lives - albums still matter. Tonight and always.
Former New York Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, former Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin, talk show Rush Limbaugh claim - " don't you love that, they "claim." I'm not claiming anything. I'm saying. Anyway. " - that Black Lives Matter exacerbates tensions and sows racial divides." How can that even be debatable?
I don't agree with the Black Lives Matter organizers. They are stated as anti-capitalists. And it's much more than just the police to them. It's about changing society entirely.
We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that.
You take a look at the history of African Americans in the US. There's been about thirty years of relative freedom. There was a decade after the Civil War and before north/south compact essentially recriminalized black life. During the Second World War there was a need for free labor so there was a freeing up of the labor force. Blacks benefitted from it.
In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.
There are advances in technology and enabling voices, but there are issues with the stories themselves. I think people of color are still not seen as human beings. They're still associated with types, with comedy, but we're in a crisis right now, with things like Black Lives Matter. We need films that address these issues.
America's got to look after America again. That means taking a realistic appraisal of who is actually at risk in this country, not whining feminists, or whinging Black Lives Matter activists, but gay people and women at risk from Islam. Also, so people in this country who have been treated badly, lied to and lied about. An honest appraisal of who actually needs government attention in this country. And when all of that is done, then we can think about interfering elsewhere again.
Hair is what connects women in Dakar and Detroit, Oprah [Winfrey] and Opal [Tometi] the Black Lives Matter activist. There's a story in every kink, curl, and coil.
I talked to a lot of Black Lives activists in various states. What I learned is that the relationship of police departments around the country with the black community is far, far more severe and awful than I had originally known.
The first thing we should be concerned about the BLM movement should be the issues that the Black Lives Matter movement is bringing forward. There's no fundamental platform being brought by activists in Oakland, Baltimore, or New Jersey. The main issues that you see, the commonality between activists all around the country, are trying to deal with the challenges in the criminal justice system, something that is very much central to my work. So my hope is that people stay focused on the urgency to create justice here at home.
Hate is too great a burden to bear.
The Fourteenth Amendment, after the civil war, in principle brought former slaves into the category of persons, theoretically. But if you actually look, almost all the cases brought up for personal rights under the Fourteenth Amendment were by corporations. Freed slaves couldn't do it. In fact they were pretty much driven back into something like slavery by a north - south compact, that allowed former slave states to criminalize black life, which made a criminal force that was basically used as a forced labor force, up until the 1930s.