Bakari Sellers Quotes

never argue with a fool because the people who are watching can’t tell the difference.

fight back. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

The reason I don’t let it bother me is something Stokely Carmichael said about racism and our reaction to it: “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem, but if he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem.

In these churches, the ministers are second in importance to the church ladies, who organize voters, make sure the church-run buses are ready on Election Day, and help people fill out absentee ballots. These ladies often, but not always, are also the ones cooking the fish. The churches almost always serve whiting because it’s cheap. Whiting is also delicious after it’s been fried golden in hot grease and Lawry’s Seasoned Salt and slathered with hot sauce and mustard. You walk into the fellowship hall to the sound of crackling and popping and the smell of hot grease wafting through the air. Every politician knows you eat white bread with fried fish, but they’re also aware that white bread sticks to your teeth and the roof of your mouth like glue. If you’re an elected official, the thing you don’t want to do is get that white bread stuck in your teeth. So you need to use your tongue and suck that bread off your teeth very, very hard. A country biscuit might come with your meal, but if you’re at a real country church, you’ll likely be served some liver pudding with the fish and grits.

Einstein quotation tatted inside my left bicep, which says, “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

Like my mother said, we’re going to need some sage.

will always view Martin Luther King Jr. as a militant negro who had a 37 percent approval rating and who was taken from us because of hate.

Anytime I got angry as a child, or even as an adult, I would call my father to vent—and he always reminded me that anger, even when justified, is not enough. It’s never a substitute for a plan.

There would not be a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama if it were not for the bravery of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, who ran for president in 1972 under the slogan “Unbought and Unbossed.

In fact, per the CDC, college-educated black women are more likely to die during childbirth or pregnancy than non-college-educated women of any other race.

What really gets my attention are leaders who prevent their own citizens from having access to hospitals, decent schools, and clean water.

In South Carolina, political folks, including my friend Nikki Haley and my old opponent and now governor Henry McMaster, were unwilling to consider measures that literally would have kept white voters alive and kept all of our hospitals running. Medicaid expansion would have added four hundred thousand jobs in South Carolina and billions of dollars of revenue. But they, and virtually all other Republicans, were against it on the basis of their opposition to Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Trump’s win is a clear example of voters voting against their own self-interests.

Why haven’t these Christian leaders spoken up about the killings of black men by police? Why haven’t they supported the #MeToo movement or railed against immigrant children being taken from their families? Why were they silent in the aftermath of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia?

The idea of health equity is about meeting people where they are, providing them with quality care no matter their backgrounds. In our case, it was a matter of life or death. We were in the position to seek people out, to find people who not only looked like us but who listened to us. Most white people get this benefit because of privilege; most black people, regardless of socioeconomics, do not.

Whether you look back at Tulsa’s wealthy “Black Wall Street” of the early twentieth century or the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or the Sellers family in Denmark circa 1950s and 1960s, black people and black power always meant being able to have economic self-sustainability and access to the ballot box.