Kimberly Jones is a novelist, director, human rights activist. She went viral after her impassioned Monopoly analogy speech after a Black Lives Matter march; calling for an end to racism and justice for Floyd’s death.
“If I right now decided that I wanted to play Monopoly with you, and for 400 rounds of playing Monopoly, I didn’t allow you to have any money, I didn’t allow you to have anything on the board, and then we played another 50 rounds of Monopoly and everything that you gained and you earned while you were playing that round of Monopoly was taken from you.
So that’s 450 years. So for 400 rounds of Monopoly, you don’t get to play at all…So then for 50 years you finally get a little bit and you’re allowed to play. And every time that they don’t like the way that you’re playing, or that you’re catching up, or that you’re doing something to be self-sufficient, they burn your game. They burn your cards. They burn your Monopoly money. And then finally at the release and the onset of that, they allow you to play, and they say, “Okay, now you catch up.”
If you’ve not seen Kimberly’s viral video please watch the full video below.
Kimberly has written a book about her experience called ‘How We Can Win’:
In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice. Here, in a vital expansion of her declaration, she calls for Reconstruction 2.0, a multilayered plan to reclaim economic and social restitutions―those restitutions promised with emancipation but blocked, again and again, for more than 150 years. And, most of all, Jones delivers strategies for how we can effect change as citizens and allies while nurturing ourselves―the most valuable asset we have―in the fight against a system that is still rigged.
