Race Quotes - Page 2

The standard of matrimony is erected by affection and purity, and does not depend upon the height, or bulk, or color, or wealth, or poverty of individuals. Water will seek its level; nature will have free course; and heart will answer to heart.

William Lloyd Garrison

As I’ve been telling your, son, you get nowhere looking at clothes and the color of the skin to judge a man. It won’t tell you nothing about what’s inside. That’s where a fellow’s mettle is, and that’s what counts.

Richard Puz

To me, its just a word, a word whose power is owned by the user and his or her intention. People give words power, so banning a word is futile, really. 'Nigga' becomes 'porch monkey' becomes 'coon' and so on if that's what's in a person's heart. They key is to change the person. And we change people through conversation, not through censorship.

Jay-Z

Color can be measured in the depth of ones' skin, however character is measured by the content of ones' heart.

Mark W Boyer

Race is there. You're tire of hearing about it? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it.

Jon Stewart

Run the race of life at your own pace.

Lailah Gifty Akita

There is nothing like race, is there?

Oscar Wilde

p 18 - Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face in the same primeval forest. That we are here today evidences their victory.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

I believe that reappropriation can be a powerful tool for creating social change. Sometimes, things like irony, satire, or humor are more effective in getting at difficult truths or concepts like white privilege, orientalism, and the exoticization of culture.

Simon S Tam

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?

W.E.B. Du Bois

We got a call from across the street that a black woman had broken into this house.”“And you were going to arrest her without even knocking on the door?”“We had to secure her first. Um. Are you okay, ma’am?”“Of course I am. Don’t you see me?”“Because we have her in custody. You don’t have to be afraid.”“I’m not afraid of my daughter-in-law, Mrs. Theon Pinkney. She’s the one who should be afraid. Four big men grabbing her and putting her in chains. What’s wrong with you?”The police stood there, slightly confused. I could see that they felt justified, even righteous, for grabbing me in Marcia’s driveway. There was no question in their minds that I was a criminal and that they were on the side of the Law.Marcia glanced at me then. We’d spent hours together but it was as if she hadn’t really gotten a good look at me until seeing the tableau in her driveway.

Walter Mosley

Ask anyone concerned with race to fast, and take note of the response you receive.

Justin K. McFarlane Beau

P44- in tarzans clever little mind many thoughts revolved and back of these was his divine power of reason.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

She got a long pointed nose and big fleshy mouth. Lips look like black plum. Eyes big, glossy. Feverish. And mean. Like, sick as she is, if a snake cross her path, she kill it

Alice Walker

The media will mess your way of thinking up, don't take they word for nothing do your on research.

Alcurtis Turner

Minority conservatives hold a special place of gutter contempt in the minds of unhinged liberals, who can never accept the radical concept of a person of color rejecting identity politics.

Michelle Malkin

The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves. They did not want the content of her ideas; they merely wanted the gesture of her presence. They had not read her blog but they had heard that she was a “leading blogger” about race.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

People run away from the love game because they know they won't win the race.

Michael Bassey Johnson

I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this “condition” affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.

Danzy Senna

Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Even she hair itself rough and wiry; long black knotty locks springing from she scalp and corkscrewing all the way down she back... The only thing soft about Tan-Tan is she big molasses-brown eyes that could look on you, and your heart would beat time...

Nalo Hopkinson

Skin color doesn't make you different,' Melody said. 'We're all the same on the inside.' 'The only people who ever say that,' Raymon replied, 'are white.

Jodi Picoult

In every four there is one the slowest, and one the swiftest; and while the race is always to the slowest, the trouble is always with the swiftest.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

Trying to be white? What the hell does that mean? I've never understood that. How could anyone be white when they aren't white? Seems like a simple enough thing to prove, right? Hold out your arm next to someone else's arm and do a simple swatch test. Of course, what people mean when they say that is that there's some kind of authentic black experience that the accused isn't properly expressing. But what is the authentic experience? Clothes that wannabe gangbangers wear on the street? Hood style? What's authentic about that? For that matter, is fashion even a good marker of authenticity or race, anyway? Aren't clothes a second skin you wear over your real skin to obscure who you really are? Can they also express who you really are?

Ahmir Questlove Thompson

No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition whites show towards me…as long as that same respect and recognition isn’t shown towards everyone of our people in this country–it doesn’t exist for me.

Malcolm X

If there is such a things as "race", there is only the Human one.

Tim Heaton

He didn’t see a man with hopes and dreams, with disappointments and accomplishments. All he saw in front of him was just another nigger.

Kenneth Eade

White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as "tokenism". For hard example, white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite of the mountain of evidence that has since accumulated to the contrary, that this was proof of a change of heart – or, as they like to say, progress. Perhaps. It all depends on how one reads the word "progress". Most of the Negroes I know do not believe that this immense concession would ever have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War, and the fact that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had, for political reasons, to be wooed by the descendants of her former masters. Had it been a matter of love or justice, the 1954 decision would surely have occurred sooner; were it not for the realities of power in this difficult era, it might very well not have occurred yet.

James Baldwin

On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

If there’s one shade a woman of colour can’t wear it’s got to be the one everyone expects, hasn’t it?

Sara Sheridan

Lucy saw the delighted expressions of the guests and knew they looked like something out an Austen movie. Well, at least Jem did. She giggled a little and cleared her throat.t“Something funny?” he murmured out of the corner of his mouth.t“Just thinking how you’re just like Captain Wentworth and I’m just like Tina Turner.

Mary Jane Hathaway

The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated -- that's the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don't get a lot of practical experience.

Ben Aaronovitch

We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.

Kiese Laymon

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!-Incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea-and put him at the head of the procession.

Mark Twain

Unfortunately, honesty hasn't always been a part of the job description for the police force, especially when dealing with our people. Today I must appeal to their sense of integrity, because we need the Mobile Police Department. Before we can do our job, they've got to do theirs...

Ravi Howard

In my quest to find Green Cottenham, I also discovered an unsettling truth that when white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our "fault". But it is undeniably our inheritance.

Douglas A. Blackmon

By unspoken agreement, we all picked an invisible line in the cracked asphalt and toed it.

Chistopher McDougall

If you chose Option 2 [confrontation], you did well. People will be less likely to engage you in office small talk of any kind, but that's likely a benefit when you consider the fact that every ten minutes of office small talk takes one year off of your life.

Baratunde R. Thurston

Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945 - well into the childhoods of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age. The clock must be reset.

Douglas A. Blackmon

See, a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That's all. The rest you can deal with. It's not about black or white. It's about God and don't let anyone tell you different. All this Jungle fever! Shoot! The Jungle fever goes away, honey, and then what are you gonna do?

James McBride

Obama will win. We will win. Then we will continue to lose. And the right questions will never be honestly asked or answered, and it's all just too much.

Kiese Laymon

I'm white and I don't dance, but that doesn't mean I have all the answers.

Charles Portis

I tried to get away from him, to get to that door, but instead I backed up against the wall and was stuck there in that white, white room.

Louise Erdrich

The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.

Roxane Gay

We have to start with recognition of the issue, confession that it exists, and a willingness to change. The fundamental problem is that white people who own the system as it is now do not allow the absence of black people to bother them.""It has not dawned on enough whites that the real issue is the integrity of the gospel itself and, consequently, the integrity of our witness to the rest of the world-where the majority is blessedly nonwhite.

William Pannell

It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.

Elizabeth Alexander

It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the lifelong race.

Robert W. Service

We still tell each other that we are lucky to be alive, when our being alive has almost nothing to do with luck, but with geography, pigmentation, and international exchange rates.

Joseph O'Connor

Ethnic minorities were 10 times more likely than whites to eat at a table where they were the only representative of their race.

Rebekah Nathan

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

James Baldwin

You can beat me in the rat race, but remember u still remain a rat.

Reetwika Banerjee

What is key to America’s understanding of class is the persistent belief — despite all evidence to the contrary — that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one’s character. By extension, the failure of a race or ethnic group to move up reflects very poorly on the group as a whole.

Michelle Alexander

Once outside, the detectives advanced up an escalator and to a floor with two elevators. One was labeled for the staff, and the other for guests. In the corner was a plain grey door which led up a staircase.“Monsieur Leor…” Jean began. “Are you up for a challenge?”“You want to run up the staircase.” Leor concluded, plainly. “Like schoolboys?”“Ouais, monsieur,” Jean replied, with a silly grin. “You can consider it your preliminary training, if that helps your dignity.

Zechariah Barrett

When you're of a different race people distrust you because they are afraid. If you don't give them reason to dislike you, it becomes their problem, not yours.

Elizabeth Haydon

No religion, No race, No countries, Today we are human.

Sixeye

In their own way, Tom Robinson's manners were as good as Atticus's

Harper Lee

Rather than evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and outright contempt. But mostly it's bred indifference.

Barack Obama

This writing thing, it ain’t like that hip hop shit, City. For li’l niggas like you,” he told me, “this writing thing is like a gotdamn porta potty. It’s one li’l nigga at a time, shitting in the toilet, funking up the little space he get. And you shit a regular shit or a classic shit. Either way,” he said. “City, you gotta shit classic, then get your black ass on off the pot.” He actually grabbed my hand. “You probably think I’m hyping you just for the money. It ain’t just about the money. It’s really not. It’s about doing whatever it takes for you to have your voice heard. So I don’t know what you’re writing in that book you always carrying around, but it better be classic because you ain’t gonna get no two times to get it right, you hear me?

Kiese Laymon

In this town, white politicians and black ministers seemed to go together like tears and tissues. At election time, the pols got religion and came looking for the blessings of black ministers as a way to get black votes without providing the kinds of services to black communities that they at least promised to East Boston and Charlestown and the other mostly white Boston neighborhoods.

Barbara Neely

Most races have a finish line, but some racists are running races where since they never hit the finish line, they never finish lying.

Justin K. McFarlane Beau

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Race Quotes - Page 2

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