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Exlpore more Racism quotes
"My grandmother though, began to prepare in her own neurotic - and I think psychotic - way to face racism. So she taught us to be racist, which is something I had to undo later when I got to Michigan, you know."
"If only Al Sharpton were around, Lincoln would have known he was a victim of racism."
"Their prejudice allowed white Southerners to look the other way when blacks were denied their most basic human rights, and it encouraged the worst of them to engage in unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence."
"You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. (...) How can I say what it feels like? I don't know. I know everybody's in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don't understand it and don't want to and spend all my time trying to forget it? I don't want to hate anybody - but now maybe, I can't love anybody either - are we friends? Can we really be friends?"
"A 'black' man who draws a 'black' person with big lips is called observant. A 'white' man who does the same is called a racist."
"The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy, and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes."
"The precise ancestry of a black drug dealer or cop killer is irrelevant. His blackness predicts and explains his crime. He reinforces the racist presumption. It is only when that presumption is questioned that a fine analysis of ancestry is invoked. Frederick Douglass was an ordinary nigger while working the fields. But as a famed abolitionist, it was often said that his genius must derive from his white half."
Explore more quotes by Constance Baker Motley
"The black population now consists of two distinct classes-the middle class and the poor."
"The women's rights movement of the 1970s had not yet emerged; except for Bella Abzug, I had no women supporters."
"I never thought I would live long enough to see the legal profession change to the extent it has."
"I grew up in a house where nobody had to tell me to go to school every day and do my homework."
"I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s."
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