They Can't Kill Us All Quotes

“And by focusing on the character of the victim, we inadvertently take the focus off the powerful and instead train our eyes and judgment on the powerless.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“the protest chants were never meant to assert the innocence of every slain black man and woman. The protests were an assertion of their humanity and a demand for a system of policing and justice that was transparent, equitable, and fair.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“Insisting that the burden of proof rests with the body of the slain black man or woman is to argue that black life, on its own, does not matter.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“There is nothing that can prepare a family for the heart-clenching shock of losing one of their own. And time and time again, those left behind described to me how so suddenly a normal, mundane weekday had become the worst day of their lives -- a black hole of time permanently etched in the video feed of their lives.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“Ferguson would birth a movement and set the nation on a course for a still-ongoing public hearing on race that stretched far past the killing of unarmed residents--from daily policing to Confederate imagery to respectability politics to cultural appropriation. The social justice movement spawned from Mike Brown's blood would force city after city to grapple with its own fraught histories of race and policing.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“In fifty years America had gone from being a country in which a black man named Barack Obama would likely have been unable to cast a ballot for president to a country in which he was elected president.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“It’s this idea that all a person had to do was say ‘I’m sorry,’ and then they never had to be held accountable for their actions,” Packnett said. “Thinking about those two incidents is, for me, a constant reminder that this system was never built for us in the first place.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“We live in a country where police violence is a pervasive fixture of daily life, not a problem plaguing some distant locale.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“Social media made it possible for young black people to document interactions they believed to be injustices, and exposed their white friends and family members to their experiences.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“In a post-Ferguson world, young black activists were eager to work outside the system. “I voted for Barack Obama twice,” Tef Poe said that evening. “And still got teargassed.” A seat at the table, the new generation of black activists reasons, isn’t worth much if your fellow diners still refuse to pass you a plate.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“The role of the press in the civil rights movement also points to our larger failure as a nation to validate and trust the black experience. Why did it take white reporters writing for white audiences to finally address the inequities that black communities had for decades been fighting? Was the lens of whiteness required for the nation to accurately recognise the black experience?”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“The theory is that legitimacy can only be earned through a long-suffering and constant presence. But that view is limiting in that it forecloses on the possibility that at times change is most effectively spurred by a fresh set of critical eyes.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“Power is never given, it's taken." It is an open secret that there exists a conflict between a new generation of young black leadership and a black establishment reluctant to give up power they spent decades fighting to secure.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“Every social movement must grapple with the generational and tactical divides that arise between varying groups and factions that comprise the ground troops.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“The protests had created a countermovement of skepticism, anger and hate, driven by some who genuinely believed that the coverage of Ferguson was overblown and amplified by others with more sinister motivations.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“If it doesn't matter how the police -- the system -- treats you, does it matter how you treat them?”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“A shortsighted framing, divorced from historical context, led us to litigate and relitigate each specific detail of the shooting without fully grasping the groundswell of pain and frustration fuming from the pores of the people of Ferguson -- which also left us blindsided by what was to come.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“We fall into the fallacy of believing we can litigate the complicated story before us into a black-and-white binary of good guys and bad guys. There are no isolated incidents, yet the media's focus on the victim and the officer inadvertently erases the context of the nation's history as it relates to race, policing, and training for law enforcement. And by focusing on the character of the victim, we inadvertently take the focus off the powerful and instead train our eyes and judgment on the powerless.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“Justice is a hard concept to wrestle with when your eyes are filled with scenes of death.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“As President Obama's second term toiled on, it became increasingly clear that talk of a postracial America was no more than cheap political punditry.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

“It’s like we’re not even human to them,”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“success isn’t always defined by victory.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

“A seat at the table, the new generation of black activists reasons, isn’t worth much if your fellow diners still refuse to pass you a plate.”
― Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement