Writers and activists gathered at The New Yorker Festival to talk about systemic racism, police violence, and the changes that are coming.
From left: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Danai Gurira, David Simon,Jelani Cobb, Claudia Rankine, Jesse Williams.
Anna Webber / Getty Images
1. There's so much kickback on [Black Lives Matter]. Here's the evidence; it's clear; it's right there in front of you. We're seeing this case after case after case, and yet, there's still kickback on the concept that we need to look at this specifically as something that's happening disproportionately to people who happen to be of African descent. And that's still coming back to us as something we have to dispute and explain. —Danai Gurira, actor (The Walking Dead), playwright (Eclipsed), and activist
2. I think a larger ideological war is happening, an ideological question of humanity. When you systematically dehumanize a people, over the course of centuries — through every single avenue that we have, through school, through media, through every single way we process information — we make certain people's value and life worth less. Then we are able to tolerate their life being treated with less value. —Jesse Williams, actor (Grey's Anatomy) and activist
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