You have to recover the capacity to imagine yourself as an ideal and figure out how to project that into the world.
Kerry James MarshallRead
The history of political movements in the African diaspora is that the solution to the problem is never in the hands of people who are advancing the movement. I try and operate on my own terms.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Political solutions often come from outside the movement's leaders, emphasizing personal agency.
Kerry James Marshall's quote reflects the idea that those who lead political movements in the African diaspora might not be the ones who ultimately produce the solutions to the issues at hand. Instead, it suggests that real change often requires individuals to take initiative on their own terms and find their own paths to influence and resolve challenges.
Themes
PoliticsAgencyMovementSolutionChange
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about grassroots activism, this quote can highlight the importance of individual empowerment.
More from Kerry James Marshall
All quotes →In Western Catholicism, darkness was evil. In the colonial and imperial context, dark skin was always weak, powerless, subjugated. If you see these images all the time, they become commonplace, and they no longer become a spectacular or sensational thing.
Kerry James MarshallRead
My introduction to art history was like everybody else's. You see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yes, these things are great. But I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at.
Kerry James MarshallRead
If you think about the way we experience art, the paradigm is still Western European. If I go to the National Gallery, what am I going to see the most of? I'm not going to see a whole lot of black figures in pictures.
Kerry James MarshallRead
When you go to an art museum, the thing you're least likely to encounter is a picture of a black person. When it comes to ideas about art and about beauty, the black figure is absent.
Kerry James MarshallRead
Too often, if you look back through the history of representation and you take the work of African-American artists, the work is on such a modest scale that it becomes sort of inconsequential.
Kerry James MarshallRead
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