Never Forget Our People Were Always Free Quotes

“We each are ultimately forced to choose whether we fight or submit to the insanity and lie that is racism.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“It's always the right time to do the right thing.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“We will never rebuild the American Dream without first telling the truth about the common struggles of the American people.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“The path to building a better, stronger America starts with being transparent about how many of us - of all colors - are struggling in similar ways.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“Ask almost any American what group is dying most frequently from bullets and how, and they will answer, "young Black men from homicide." The actual answer is old White men from suicide.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“Racism so colors our nation's collective imagination that it renders entire classes of suffering White people virtually invisible.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“Has human kindness dried up in Southern white people? Is this why the South today constitutes a lowland where acidic puddles of racist poison stagnate, especially among the older population?”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“Over time, farm children, trying to get over their tender-heartedness when killing chickens, rabbits, pigs, and other livestock, manage to harden their hearts. In the same way, many Southerners get over their innate dislike of mistreating others. They teach themselves and their children, "Blacks aren't the same as you and I, and so it is okay to mistreat them.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“Why did White Southerners leave the heavy lifting to our black brothers and sisters and their Northern allies?”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“This is much like today when many poor and working-class white Southern males of a certain age support the right-wing policies of Republicans dictating low taxes for the richest Americans.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“Listening is the most transformative sign of respect we show our fellow human beings.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“Gospel is about the trouble that come. Blues is about the trouble that already done happened.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“In most prisons, upwards of 90 percent of inmates of all colors were too poor to afford their own lawyer.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“After decades of sustained enforcement, there simply weren't enough Black crack addicts to arrest, so the police shifted their gaze toward meth addicts. And they moved from housing projects to trailer parks, from urban areas to rural areas, rounding people up like we had done in tenements with Black folks in the war on crack. And in the process, the number of American White men behind bars skyrocketed. As a result, this country became the world's leading incarcerator. Prior to that, it was the former Republic of South Africa. Prior to that, it as the former Soviet Union. It is worth noting that both nations no longer exist. Each had been destabilized by internal stresses exacerbated in part by the high costs of incarcerating a huge percentage of the domestic population.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“As I once said to my (White) father, "Dad, you know that if White privilege in America in the twenty-first century only buys you a twenty to twenty-five percent discount on the incarceration rate of Black men in South Africa at the height of apartheid, then we're all in the frying pan. When the only question is whether you are on the edge or in the middle of the pan, everyone should be clear that we are all in the pan!”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“You could see slave plantations from space, with their large swaths of land cleared by Brown backs bent over, picking cotton. You could see Jim Crow's ghettos from space, Brown bodies pushed into overpopulated urban centers. And now you can see America's prisons pockmarking the landscape from sea to shining sea.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“The problem of mass incarceration in America is so big you can see it from space.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“The day our law enforcement agencies stop focusing on the common biological and cultural factors of color, hair, and faith and start focusing exclusively on criminal behavior is the day we will all be a whole lot safer than we are right now.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“Racism is a lie based on a lie.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“Absent involvement from White people and men in the fight against racism and sexism, respectively, those societal structures will never fundamentally change.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“And then one day it just hit me that if women could have ended sexism all be themselves, they would have done it a long time ago. And if Black folks could have ended racism all by themselves, they would have done it a long time ago too. I figured that women needed some men working alongside them to end sexism. And Black folks needed some White folks learning and working alongside them to end racism.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“The family lore is of rape after rape after rape. My grandma's body, you could say, is a Confederate monument.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“Baby, its true. Pessimists are right more often, but optimists win more often. In this life, you have to decide what’s more important to you. As for me, I’ll take winning.”
― Ben Jealous, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing