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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."
71
"By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching."
62
"We can go on talking about racism and who treated whom badly, but what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wallow in that or are you going to create your own agenda?"
57
"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."
57
"Washington shows the Negro not only at his best, but also at his worst."
53
"Not all 'whites' are racists. Not all racists are 'white."
49
"I grow dizzy when I recall that the number of manufactured tanks seems to have been more important to me than the vanished victims of racism."
48
"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."
47
"Racism tears down your insides so that no matter what you achieve, you're not quite up to snuff."
46
"The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery."
42
"If only Al Sharpton were around, Lincoln would have known he was a victim of racism."
40
"We must treat the disease of racism. This means we must understand the disease."
37
"It's a scary world we live in when a person of color endorses a racist for president."
34
"They used to say, 'If we find a good black player, we'll sign him.' They was lying."
34
"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?"
29
"In high school I dated a white woman. She would come to visit me on the rez. And her dad, who was very racist, didn't like that at all. And he told her one time, 'You shouldn't go on the rez if you're white because Indians have a lot of anger in their heart.'"
29
"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."
28
"The white people always want to fight someone and they always get the dark-skinned people to do the fighting."
26
"A vision of cultural homogeneity that seeks to deflect attention away from or even excuse the oppressive, dehumanizing impact of white supremacy on the lives of black people by suggesting black people are racist too indicates that the culture remains ignorant of what racism really is and how it works. It shows that people are in denial. Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation?"
26
"Film and novel characters are often stereotyped, but racial stereotyping in many novels or films creates & encourages labelling, discrimination & racism."
24
"What mattered was that these beliefs had swept through the souls of everyone else like a plague. He couldn't see the end of it. Even a hundred years in the future, he knew, the roots still had not been fully pulled up from society. Wherever, whenever he went, the color of his skin set the boundaries of what he could achieve, and there was very little - if any - recourse for finding a way around it."
24
"I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism--in order to believe themselves to be nonracist."
19
"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."
15
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