Race Quotes - Page 3

She learned early on, in her adopted country, that race was an easy excuse to stop awkward explanations. People hesitated to probe into such a sensitive matter.

E. Journey

We play into the definitions and stereotypes others impose on us and accept the model-minority myth, thinking it's positive, but it's a trap just like any stereotype. They put a piece of model-minority cheese between the metal jaws of their mousetrap, but we're lactose intolerant anyway! We can't even eat the cheese.

Eddie Huang

People aren't social, they're tribal. Race doesn't exist, but tribes are fucking real.

Mat Johnson

This past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering – enough is certainly as good as a feast – but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth – and indeed, no church – can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worse that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one’s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.

James Baldwin

Social Darwinism had continued to flourish in German. Together with Mendelian genetics, it was widely thought to provide a scientific basis for the eugenic ‘Racial Hygiene’ movement.

Jonathan Glover

Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream…The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried out best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.

Ta-Nahisi Coates

As best I could I had answered their many questions. They were surprised when I told them that Europeans were, with minor differences, exactly like them, marrying and bringing up their children in accordance with principles and traditions, that they had good morals and were in general good people."Are there any farmers among them?" Mahjoub asked me."Yes, there are some farmers among them. They’ve got everything—workers and doctors and farmers and teachers, just like us." I preferred not to say the rest that had come to my mind: that just like us they are born and die, and in the journey from the cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated; that they fear the unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child; that some are strong and some are weak; that some have been given more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the differences are narrowing and most of the weak are no longer weak. I did not say this to Mahjoub, though I wish I had done so, for he was intelligent; in my conceit I was afraid he would not understand.

Tayeb Salih

If we conservatives “of color” refuse to promote the welfare state, unfettered abortion, affirmative action, and massive immigration, we are guilty of “selling out.

Michelle Malkin

Canadian official multiculturalism has developed through the 1970s and '80s, and has become in the '90s a major part of Canadian political discourse in Canada rather than in the United States, which is also a multi-ethnic country, may be due to the lack of an assimilationist discourse so pervasive in the U.S. The melting pot thesis has not been popular in Canada, where the notion of a social and cultural mosaic has had a greater influence among liberal critics. This mosaic approach has not been compensated with an integrative politics of antiracism or of class struggle which is sensitive to the racialization involved in Canadian class formation. The organized labour movement in Canada has repeatedly displayed anti-immigrant sentiments. For any inspiration for an antiracist theorization and practice of class struggle Canadians have looked to the United States or the Caribbean.

Himani Bannerji

White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn’t threatening

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

the country is almost ruined with pious white people: such pious politicians as we have just before elections, such pious goings on in all departments of church and state, that a fellow does not know who'll cheat him next.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

First, we are a nation of different races, nationalities, and ethnic groups. This brings us to the second commonality… we are all Americans. Yes, we fuss, we have differences of opinions, but we are all Americans. The third and most important commonality is the fact that we all bleed red. We are humankind. These are the bonds that unite us and make us better human beings.

James Morris Robinson

Everyone's colored, or you wouldn't be able to see them.

Captain Beefheart

If you’re looking for fast driving there’s a dragway in the southwestern part of the county. It opens next week.”“Do you race there?” he asks.“Yes.” And I plan on spending a lot of time there over the next six weeks.“Isaiah.” Beth attempts to step in between us, but Logan angles himself so that she can’t. “That’s not why I brought him here.”An insane glint strikes the guy’s eyes and all of a sudden, I feel a connection to him. A twitch of his lips shows he might be my kind of crazy. “How fast do the cars there go?”“Some guys hit speeds of 120 mph in an eighth mile.”“No!” Beth stomps her foot. “No. I promised Ryan nothing crazy would happen. Logan, this is not why I brought you here.”“Have you hit those speeds?” He swats his hand at Beth as if she’s a fly, earning my respect. Most guys would be terrified of having their balls ripped off and handed to them for dismissing Beth like that.“Not driving my car, I haven’t,” I answer honestly. But I hope to with Rachel’s car, and with mine, after a few modifications. “Speed can be bought. Just depends on how much you want to spend.”Logan offers his hand. “I’m Logan.”“Isaiah,” I say as we shake.“Shit,” mumbles Beth.

Katie McGarry

Our political discourse has degenerated into anxieties about whether giving benefits to those people over there will take money out of the pockets of my kind of people over here, even when the changes are those from which we would all benefit.""The church is one of the few remaining institutions in the American scene that normalizes the effects of slavery, with most Christians preserving these segregated spaces in the interests of cultural comfort. Racially separate churches violate the interdependence that should characterize authentic Christian communities. Further, this individualism blocks churches from the blessings of gifts preserved in separate traditions. For example, segregated white churches celebrate the confessions and the rich legacies of the intellectual giants of the faith, but too often preach a weak and disembodied gospel that reduces spirituality to symbolism, and that separates material concerns from moral choices and the pursuit of righteousness.""Indeed, we have reached a sad state of affairs when we are all unwilling to be challenged when we go to church." "We should not move too quickly to a cheap reconciliation that forgets the past rather than honoring it as a clay vessel that contains a refined treasure bearing witness to the presence of Jesus at the margins. We need to make space for the histories of ethnic pain to be shared and revered among whites and all peoples of color, and to be instructed by them. That is, we need to understand how our past impinges on the present before we can move forward together toward our future. We cannot be who we are called to be unless we can gain access to the treasures of the gospel that have been preserved in the separate traditions of now segregated ethnic churches. We will not testify to the glory of God and the manifold riches of his mercy to the nations until we do.

Love L. Sechrest

Do I love Black people? Yes. As much as I love my own race.Do Black lives matter?Of course.Will I oppress my spirit with White Guilt and faulty notions of White Privilege?Hell no.Gotta love yourself before you can love anyone else.

Jonathan Heatt

What I was pointing to was that, yeah, blackness is a fiction; whiteness is a fiction. When we live according to these categories, we’re living within a fiction. Of course, it’s a fiction with very real consequences.

Jess Row

The race bullies win by relying on racial guilt. But collective racial guilt can only separate Americans. We are individuals, not homogenous members of racial subsets. Only when we learn to cherish the words of Martin Luther King, judging people as individuals, will we truly have the guts to stand up to the race bullies. After all, to paraphrase a man who once stood for unification rather than division, we're not black America or white America. We're the United States of America. We're brothers and sisters.If we don't begin to recognize that simple truth -- and recognize the inherent goodness of America, and our ability to look beyond skin color and ethnic heritage -- the race bullies will continue to tear American down for their own political gain, brick by brick.

Ben Shapiro

In later years, I confess that I do not envy the white boy as I once did. I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.

Booker T. Washington

Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it.

Studs Terkel

A person should be important to you for you to be also important to the person so that you will be important to any other person.

Boakye Opoku Agyemang

I prefer being curious, mischievous and clever black monkey to being filthy, greedy and bad mannered white pig.

Boakye Opoku Agyemang

It's no longer time to take sides for or against race, rather sides against those who still do.

Brian Spellman

There remains a problem with race in America because of the church's failure to understand the issues from a biblical perspective." "Rather than being called into a different community by Scripture, we see our broken communities as justified by Scripture.""Rather than challenge the worldly status quo, religious groups perpetuate stereotypes, sectarianism, and schisms when accepting ethnic denominational identities- inverting Pentecost by reading in multiple languages unrecognized by listeners and offering separate worship services according to musical preference." "Ultimately, our aim is to draw attention to the biblical narrative from which comes to the strength for the long road of reconciliation.

Joy Moore

At the end of the race nobody really cares about how you started, so stay laser focused and finish strong. Get ready to proclaim "I did it!

Farshad Asl

there is no stronger taboo today than talking about race. In many cases, just being accused of “racism” can get you fired. Yet, teachers in America know the races differ in school achievement; policemen know the races differ in crime rates; social workers know the races differ in rates of welfare dependency or getting infected with AIDS. And sports fans know that Blacks excel at boxing, basketball, and running. They all wonder why. Some blame poverty, White racism, and the legacy of slavery. Although many doubt that “White racism” really tells the whole story, few dare share their doubts. When it comes to race, do you really dare to say what you think?

Rushton

Is Obama Anything but Black?So lots of folk—mostly non-black—say Obama’s not black, he’s biracial, multiracial, black-and-white, anything but just black. Because his mother was white. But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass had white fathers. Imagine them saying they were not black.Imagine Obama, skin the color of a toasted almond, hair kinky, saying to a census worker—I’m kind of white. Sure you are, she’ll say. Many American Blacks have a white person in their ancestry, because white slave owners liked to go a-raping in the slave quarters at night. But if you come out looking dark, that’s it. (So if you are that blond, blue-eyed woman who says “My grandfather was Native American and I get discrimination too” when black folk are talking about shit, please stop it already.) In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you. Barack Obama, looking as he does, would have had to sit in the back of the bus fifty years ago. If a random black guy commits a crime today, Barack Obama could be stopped and questioned for fitting the profile. And what would that profile be? “Black Man.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

What if, ladies and gentlemen, today I told you that anyone here who was born on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday was free to leave right now? Also, they'd be given the most central parking spots in the city, and the biggest houses. They would get job interviews before others who were born later in the week, and they'd be taken first at the doctor's office, no matter how many patients were waiting in line. If you were born from Thursday to Sunday, you might try to catch up – but because you were straggling behind, the press would always point to how inefficient you are. And if you complained, you'd be dismissed for playing the birth-day card.” I shrug. “Seems silly, right? But what if on top of these arbitrary systems that inhibited your chances for success, everyone kept telling you that things were actually pretty equal?

Jodi Picoult

Did you ever think our misfortune is directly related to your good fortune? Maybe the house your parents bought was on the market because the sellers didn't want my mama in the neighborhood. Maybe the good grades that eventually led you to law school were possible because your mama didn't have to work eighteen hours a day, and was there to read to you at night, or make sure you did your homework. How often do you remind yourself how lucky you are that you own your house, because you were able to build up equity through generations in a way families of color can't? How often do you open your mouth at work and think how awesome it is that no one's thinking you're speaking for everyone with the same skin color you have? How hard is it for you to find the greeting card for your baby's birthday with a picture of a child that has the same color skin as her? How many times have you seen a painting of Jesus that looks like you? Prejudice goes both ways, you know. There are people who suffer from it, and there are people who profit from it.

Jodi Picoult

Black skin was filled with so many barriers, so many restrictions, so many.

Randi Pink

The only people discussing “race” with any insight and courage are loud middle-aged white men who romanticize the Kennedys and Motown, well-read open-minded white kids like the tie-dyed familiar sitting next to me in the Free Tibet and Boba Fett T-shirt, a few freelance journalists in Detroit, and the American hikikomori who sit in their basements pounding away at their keyboards composing measured and well-thought-out responses to the endless torrent of racist online commentary.

Paul Beatty

The spectacle of the shooting suggest an event out of time, as if the killing of black people with white-supremacist justification interrupts anything other than regular television programming. But Dylan Storm Roof did not create himself from nothing. He as grown up with the rhetoric and orientation of racism.

Jesmyn Ward

I DREAM OF A CHARCOAL CHALKY AFRICAI am as black as charcoalBut that is only my skin colorI don’t need to see hacked white bodiesTo know that we are the same on the insideI feel the same anguish and disgust for the innocentMurdered black South Africans during apartheidMurdered white South Africans post-apartheidWe might not be there to fight apartheid era atrocities But we are here now and must prevent post-apartheid atrocities Murdering innocent whites will not bring back murdered blacksI challenge you to search online nowGoogle ‘South African farm murders’And see if you can look at the gruesome picturesOf innocent children, women and menDo we need more people to be horribly hacked to death?Before we stop the divisive rhetoric of the extreme left?We made a mistake letting apartheid drag on so longBut must we repeat that mistake with post-apartheid massacres?Some of these murdered whites fought against apartheidThese murdered children didn’t even know about apartheidDon’t take away your eyes now!No, don’t you dare take your eyes off those pictures!The real apartheid criminals are rich and well protectedKilling these innocent people is not justiceIt is inhuman; it is cowardice Don’t look away and don’t hold back the tearsIt is not only a cry for white victimsIt is not only a cry for black victimsIt is a cry for a better South AfricaA cry for a richer, charcoal, chalky Africa

Dauglas Dauglas

Race, let's remember, is a social invention and a cultural identification, not a biological reality.

Victoria E. Bynum

If "RACE" becomes the norm, then harmony will not prevail.

Henry Johnson Jr

Don't be amazed. There is nothing strange about eight white men being alone and therefore helpless.

Gordon MacCreagh

Upon seeing the third and final table I realized that most of the people listed would most likely be dead, or come out of these qualifying races with severed limbs of as Revaarn liked to say 'Loose a limb no problem, it'll be amputated and replaced with a robotic one.

Charon Lloyd-Roberts

The new vantage from which Christian theology as a discourse on Christian identity must operate in the modern world, then, is the Christological horizon of Mary-Israel. To be Christian is to enter into this horizon. But where is the horizon concretely displayed, where is it made visible if not in despised dark (and especially dark female) flesh? Is this not the flesh of homo sacer . . .the flesh that is impoverished, "despised and rejected of men," flesh that in shame we "hide our faces from" (cf. Isa. 53:3)? But if this is the case, it follows that the poverty of dark flesh is where one finds the wealthy God. . . In (Christ"s) taking on the form of the slave, the from of despised dark (female) flesh there is the diclsoure (sic) of divinity, a disclosure that undoes the social arrangement of the colonial-racial tyranny (tynannos,), as the seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor called it, that is the darker side of modernity

J. Kameron Carter

Seeing race is always about discriminating, a discerning, trained eye recognizing the "essential" or defining characteristic in the individual that confers racial categorization.

Barbara Katz Rothman

When you've learned to both see and not see the resemblance, then you see the uniqueness.

Barbara Katz Rothman

We have disagreements as to what race does and ought to mean, but we have a remarkable consensus on what it is, without any ability to define it technically.

Barbara Katz Rothman

he lived in London indeed but invisibly, his existence like an erased pencil sketch

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

After using a paint chart from a local DIY superstore to identify the skin tone of his penis as midnight chocolate, Miriam stayed down on one knee and offered him the citizenship he had always wanted and the middle-aged white woman he would grudgingly accept.

David F. Porteous

No one in the world -- in the entire world -- know more -- knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here -- and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other.

James Baldwin

I recall a podcast featuring American white nationalist Jared Taylor. He claims that every important decision in their lives - where to live, whom to marry, where to send their children to school - 'liberals are not different from members of the Ku Klux Klan'.And, if you believe the Age article, in the only federal electorate held by the Greens, families are making their schooling decision as if they're in the UPF.

John Safran

After so many years struggling to keep up with you, I finally realized we’re not even running the same race.

Scott Stabile

In that strained, still second when her eyes met Christina Tomas's before she took the forms, she shrank. She shrank like a dried leaf. She had spoken English all her life, led the debating society in secondary school, and always thought the American twang inchoate; she should not have cowered and shrunk, but she did. And in the following weeks, as autumn's coolness descended, she began to practice an American accent.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nothing changes if we just feel shitty about being White. And nothing changes if we refuse to talk about it. The opposite of white pride does not have to be white shame. We can’t push it away and pretend it’s not us. We are not color-blind, we are not post-race, we do not get to reject our whiteness because it makes us feel bad…This does not get solved with a Celebration of Diversity Day and a coexist bumper sticker. (Kate Schatz)

Carolina De Robertis

As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with “race.” I didn't know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So when the other kids in Soweto called me "white", even though I was light brown, I just thought that they had their colors mixed up, like they hadn't learned them properly. "Ah, yes, my friend. You've confused aqua with turquoise. I can see how you made that mistake. You're not the first.

Trevor Noah

They probably don't really like pale skin but they certainly like walking into a store without some security dude following them. Hating Your Goy and Eating One Too, as the great Philip Roth put it. So if everyone in America aspires to be WASPs, then what do WASPs aspire to? Does anyone know?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Serious history was the West, and the West was white.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I can’t comprehend why any black man with even a lick of sense would have the slightest bit of interest in time travel. Going backward in time? A black man? You have got to be out of your mind.

Dexter Palmer

Abinia,” he said, pointing toward the chickens, “you look at those birds. Some of them be brown, some of them be white and black. Do you think when they little chicks, those mamas and papas care about that?

Kathleen Grissom

Whiteness has been, above all, a racial formation that presupposed and reproduced relations of inequality and domination between "whites" and their racial others.

Moon-kie Jung

I was telling them about back home and how all the boys were chasing me because I was half-caste, and they said I was dissing myself. So now I say biracial, and I'm supposed to be offended when somebody says half-caste. I've met a lot of people here with white mothers and they are so full of issues, eh. I didn't know I was even supposed to have issues until I came to America . Honestly, if anybody wants to raise bi-racial kids, do it in Nigeria

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If race disappears as a category of official division, as it has in most of the world, this will facilitate the emergence of a plural racial order where the groups exist in practice but are not official recognized - and anyone trying to address racial division is likely to be chided for racializing the population.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status--none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions.

Margot Lee Shetterly

Yes, being black is a full-time job: sometimes you are invisible, other times you are hyper-visible,” he says. “Sometimes you are welcome, other times you are not. The thermostat is always moving and you have to keep adapting to find some comfort level. Richard Pryor used to talk about going to Africa and people there telling him he was white. Even though he was black, he just wasn’t black enough.

Paul Beatty

Here comes the best part,” I say, realizing that I’ve spoken aloud the words I always tease Haddie for when she announces them at the bridge of the song. The lyrics come and I sing along as the words wash over me, moving me as they always do, bringing goose bumps to my flesh. “There you are, sitting in the garden, clutching my coffee, calling me sugar. You called me sugar.”“I don’t get it,” Colton says, “Why is that the best part?”“Because it’s the moment she realizes that he loves her,” I muse, a soft smile on my face.

K.Bromberg

You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy.""Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Previous 1 2 3 4 5 … 12 Next

Race Quotes - Page 3

Related Topics