Race Relations Quotes

Anyone intent on moral clarity might want to find another book and, in fact, might not want to go anywhere near the enduring chasm of race in the United States.

Timothy B. Tyson

It is a big deal to work with people who are different from you. And if you're white or of a higher class,no matter what race you are, you'll probably mess up. Maybe get yelled at. But there are worse things. Like keeping your dignity safe at home, while the world goes to hell.

Kelly J. Cogswell

My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference. What can I say to a man who asks that? All I can do is try to explain to him why he asks the question. You have looked at us for years as different from you that you may never see us really. You don’t understand because you think of us as second-class humans. We have been passive and accommodating through so many years of your insults and delays that you think the way things used to be is normal. When the good-natured, spiritual-singing boys and girls rise up against the white man and demand to be treated like he is, you are bewildered. All we want is what you want, no less and no more. (Chapter 13).

Shirley Chisholm

It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.

Malcolm X

Sandra L. West and Aberjhani have compiled an encyclopedia that makes an important contribution to our need to know more about one of modern America’s truly significant artistic and cultural movements. It helps us to acknowledge the complexity of African American life at a time when the nation’s culture was taking on a recognizable shape, when race was becoming less of a crushing burden and more of a challenge to progressive people and their ideals, and when cities and their inhabitants symbolized the end of the past and the seductiveness of the new.

Clement Alexander Price

I'm too old to be ignorant as I am." --Twelve-year-old Gabriella to the general, who does not want her to know about Emmett Till and the world's brutality.

Elle Thornton

White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.

Colson Whitehead

You ever think about the noose?''I been thinking about the noose since I was born.

Stacey Lee

Under the white population of the United States of America only the reactionary classes oppress the black population. Under no circumstance can they represent the workers, farmers and revolutionary intellectuals and other enlighted people who form the majority of the white population.

Mao Zedong

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

Colson Whitehead

The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.

Barack Obama

At home they thought of white people as a vague but powerful entity--like the forces that control the weather, that capable of destruction, that hidden from view.

Ayana Mathis

Perhaps finding out that we carry New World history in our genes will transcend racial checkboxes altogether and enable Latino-Americans to rethink what America is supposed to look like.

Raquel Cepeda

This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best — less trouble).

Zadie Smith

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

Jon Stewart

There is nothing like race, is there?

Oscar Wilde

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

Justin K. McFarlane Beau

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

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

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

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

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

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

Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)

Cornel West

Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro's making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.... Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are idential.... There is no help or healing in apparaising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem--a magnanimous understanding by both races--is the first step toward its solution.

Isabel Wilkerson

Pride is the problem. Everyone wants to be right so badly they overlook the "rights" of others.

Carlos Wallace

Take the side of truth, you'll be right every time.

Katelyne Parker

Many of my ex-girlfriends were habitual half-asian daters. These women considered half-asian men 'exotic,' 'sexy,' and 'just-like-Keanu Reeves-in-the-Matrix. I consider these stereotypes appropriate because I got laid.

Kip Fulbeck

In the midst of combat, we learned a great deal about mankind and its many different races, creeds and beliefs.

Carlos Wallace

Some people say, "What difference does it make what color the winemaker is that made the wine? Judge the wines off their own merit." Like, of course. And I do believe that my wine is judged off its own merit. But the fact is that when you walk into places and people can't believe that you're the principal or you're the owner or you made the wine, it's mind-blowing to me some days. It's like, wow. That's why we need to continue talking about it.

Andre Hueston Mack

America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.

Pew Research Center

I shake my head at my friend. “Not only is they lines, but you know good as I do where them lines be drawn.” Aibileen shakes her head. “I used to believe in em. I don’t anymore. They in our heads. People like Miss Hilly is always trying to make us believe they there. But they ain’t.

Kathryn Stockett

Race determines variables that yield results undesirable to one sector, while rendering a noticeable favor to others.

Lamont Renzo Bracy

Jeb'd said it was harder for a pretty girl to find work; even white men liked flowers, whether red or pink or blue.

Shannon Celebi

Race should be seen in one way, and one way only: on your marks, get set, go!

Anthony Marais

Beneath the armor of skin/and/bone/and/mindmost of our colors are amazingly the same.

Aberjhani

One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell...

W.E.B. Du Bois

Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

Tim Wise

...After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: To do otherwise would force whites to either push for change (which they would perceive as against their interests) or live consciously as hypocrites who speak of freedom and opportunity but perpetuate a system of inequality.The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

Tim Wise

The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

Tim Wise

Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others—usually the sons of the masters—wish to help him to rise.

W.E.B. Du Bois

It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor for the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both act as reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired effect. Both must change, or neither can improve to any great extent."(p.88)...."Only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the color-line in this critical period of the Republic shall justice and right triumph,

W.E.B. Du Bois

White supremacy is a black person telling the people of Baltimore to chill out and try peace, thinking they came up with that thought all on their own.

Darnell Lamont Walker

My heart isn't big enough to care for the oppressors.

Darnell Lamont Walker

Linnie. And this Winnie.” They wore identical smiles, their bright black eyes sparked with curiosity. “Are you the doctor?”t“No, I’m just volunteering.”t“I knowed that, too.” Winnie gave her an exaggerated shake of the head. “Girls is never the doctor. They’s the nurses.”t“Oh no, what about Dr. Clare? Huh? The lady doctor who took care of Grammy in the hospital when she broke her hip bone?” Linnie asked.t“Yeah, but she was a white lady. They can be doctors.” Winnie looked at Lucy. “Right? There are white lady doctors. I seen ‘em.”tLucy felt her eyes go wide. Were there children who still believed your gender or color dictated your career? “There are white lady doctors, black lady doctors, white man doctors, black man doctors.”tThey stared at her. tShe thought for a moment. “And there are white man nurses and black man nurses, too.”t“Now you’re just bein’ silly,” Linnie said and let out a laugh.

Mary Jane Hathaway

But in the earlier hours, or so I have read, they still have got their daylight minds. It takes the midnight mind to do the black deed to the black man.

Elizabeth Spencer

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

Toni Morrison

You think you're going to impress an American jury with [your] words? In the eyes of the Americans, you're doomed. Just looking at you in an orange suit, chains, and being Muslim and Arabic is enough to convict you.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi

I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why'd she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn't she care about the others?Today, I zoomed out and wondered why I'm still in America.

Darnell Lamont Walker

We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

All we can infer (from the archaeological shards dug up in Berkshire, Devon and Yorkshire) is that the first Britons, whoever they were and however they came, arrived from elsewhere. The land (Britain) was once utterly uninhibited. Then people came.

Robert Winder

Black, white, Latino, gay, straight – if any one of them came across a bear in the woods, they’d all taste like chicken.

Jennifer Lane

The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us.

Chuck D

When you're marginalized, there are no "them people," if we're all on the outskirts of the same margin.

Darnell Lamont Walker

If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.

Wendell Berry

If you see a group of people struggling over generations and you attribute those struggles to bad character, then you do not truly believe we are all created equally.

Jonathan R. Miller

You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.

James Baldwin

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Race Relations Quotes

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