Racism Quotes - Page 8

It's not the fact that some people disagree with the protests. That is as much a right as the protests themselves. It is the hateful, profane, condescending way some have expressed their discontent that baffles me. How do you criticize actions you've deemed disrespectful and divisive and an affront to civilized behavior with rhetoric to the same end? That's like the devil judging the Grim Reaper for harvesting souls.

Carlos Wallace

African-Amendment.

Darnell Lamont Walker

There are white people who know how to act politely to blacks, but deep down you know they're uncomfortable. They're worse, more dangerous than those who speak their minds, because they don't know what they're capable of.

Cristina García

For many years in Cuba, nobody spoke of the problem between blacks and whites. It was considered too disagreeable to discuss. But my father spoke to me clearly so that I would understand what happened to his father and his uncles during the Little War of 1912, so that I would know how our men were hunted down day and night like animals, and finally hung by their genitals from the lampposts in Guáimaro. The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books. Why, then, should I trust anything I read? I trust only what I see, what I know with my heart, nothing more.

Cristina García

One strain of African American thought holds that it is a violent black recklessness—the black gangster, the black rioter—that strikes the ultimate terror in white America. Perhaps it does, in the most individual sense. But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract—The Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Hilly raises her voice about three octaves higher when she talks to coloured people. Elizabeth smiles like she's talking to a child, although certainly not her own. I am starting to notice things.

Kathryn Stockett

It speaks volumes when people who are discriminated against go on to discriminate against others.

DaShanne Stokes

Racism is a big problemCreated by small minds

Gil Gonzales

WHITE NATIONALISTS & BLACK LIVES MATTER: The harder you swing the pendulum one way, the more violently it will swing back.

A.E. Samaan

Discrimination is not just racial now. It’s also about the kind of body parts you have.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Standing against discrimination for some while supporting discrimination against others hurts us all.

DaShanne Stokes

I don't like the way our community throws the word around like it's water, because it's a derogatory term. A lot of times people come up to me and say, "What's up my nigger?" I'll respond, "Nah, wait a minute. What?" "Oh, oh, what's up my brother?" Sometimes you have to check people, because if it gets loose with us then white people will start to use it. I know a bunch of white people that started to get lax so I had to check them. Some black people were afraid to check them because they thought it was cool. You can never turn that word around and make it cool Nigger is just derogatory, it's wrong, and it's a fucked up term. It's not a word of love, Yo, what's up my nigger?" Fuck that. You can't turn the word puss around. Go around and say, "What's up pussy" to a brother. He'll try to kill you. "What's up dickhead?" You can't turn that around, so you can't turn nigger around as hard as you try.

Chuck D

Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Marton interacted, thus transforming a seventeen-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim.

Jesmyn Ward

The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes— I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether— is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.

James Baldwin

When you grow up knowing that you deserve to be on top, that the lesser houses exist to serve your house’s glorious destiny, you take such things for granted. You’re born assuming that someone else is paying the cost of your life. It’s just the way things are. What happens during annexation—it’s a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.

Ann Leckie

If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them?

Amitav Ghosh

In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

Angela Y. Davis

...[E]xcept the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an intermitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period. Upon the slightest and most unreasonable pretences, as well as upon accusations the most absurd and groundless, their persons and property were exposed to every turn of popular fury... Yet the passive courage inspired by the love of gain induced the Jews to dare the various evils to which they were subjected, in consideration of the immense profits which they were enabled to realise in a country naturally so wealthy as England. In spite of every kind of discouragement, and even of the special court of taxations already mentioned, called the Jews' Exchequer, erected for the very purpose of despoiling and distressing them, the Jews increased, multiplied, and accumulated huge sums, which they transferred from one hand to another by means of bills of exchange-an invention for which commerce is said to be indebted to them, and which enabled them to transfer their wealth from land to land, that, when threatened with oppression in one country, their treasure might be secured in another. The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which they were visited...

Sir Walter Scott

We are not past racism. It took us 500 and however many years to get us where we are; it's not gonna change in one day or in one election. We made a step maybe, which they'll try and take away from us as soon as they can. But I mean what the fuck is the Tea Party about? It's not about "tea"; it ain't about "trans", either.

Bo Brown

Some lurid things have been said about me—that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth—that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I'd only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been true when I was still on the correct side, and that such shocking deformities didn't seem to count for so much then. Arguing with the Stalinist mentality for more than three decades now, and doing a bit of soapboxing and street-corner speaking on and off, has meant that it takes quite a lot to hurt my tender feelings, or bruise my milk-white skin.

Christopher Hitchens

You are not special. You're just fucking not. You're a bland, boring motherfucker just like everybody else. You ever been to the mall and just looked in the eyes of the fellow travelers and seen how dull and lifeless their eyes are? Yours look like that too. You know why? 'Cause you're just as bland, you're just as fucking boring, there's nothing special about you. And trying to piggyback on the accomplishments of your race, or like, any fucking larger group really, is pathetic. You have to stand on individual merit and you just can't accept the fact that you suck. It's alright! I suck, Weber sucks, everyone sucks! We're all fucking shit, we suck dick, we're lame as fuck. And that's okay. That's fine.

T.J. Kirk

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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

And you know who's especially stupid? People who look at how unexceptional and bland and boring they are and say, "You know how I can remedy this? I will take solace in the accomplishments of my entire race. That way, I can draw attention away from the fact that I personally have not accomplished shit!

T.J. Kirk

Ed Lim’s daughter, Monique, was a junior now, but as she’d grown up, he and his wife had noted with dismay that there were no dolls that looked like her. At ten, Monique had begun poring over a mail-order doll catalog as if it were a book–expensive dolls, with n ames and stories and historical outfits, absurdly detailed and even more absurdly expensive.‘Jenny Cohen has this one,’ she’d told them, her finger tracing the outline of a blond doll that did indeed resemble Jenny Cohen: sweet faced with heavy bangs, slightly stocky. 'And they just made a new one with red hair. Her mom’s getting it for her sister Sarah for Hannukkah.’ Sarah Cohen had flaming red hair, the color of a penny in the summer sun. But there was no doll with black hair, let alone a face that looked anything like Monique’s. Ed Lim had gone to four different toy stores searching for a Chinese doll; he would have bought it for his daughter, whatever the price, but no such thing ex

Celeste Ng

There are no superior or inferior races. No one is intrinsically inferior or superior. All have the same value as creatures of god. Those who put others down simply want to exploit them.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

To those supremacist racists I ask what color will be their bodies when they turn to dust.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and criticize others who have to fight for the things you take for granted.

DaShanne Stokes

As fantastical as America’s space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.

Margot Lee Shetterly

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.

Sherman Alexie

White privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, an absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost.

Reni Eddo-Lodge

Racism doesn’t care about respectability, wealth, education, or status

Roxane Gay

Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.

Maya Angelou

I like being present in spaces where I am not welcome because you do not deserve to feel comfortable just because you're racist or sexist or small-minded.

Scaachi Koul

To be born into, to go to school, to study, to learn, to play, to worship, to love, to work and to die in segregation and not have one single person who loved, mentored or guided me convey that there was any loss.

Robin DiAngelo

Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side. You can say that you don’t pick sides, but eventually life will force you to pick a side.

Trevor Noah

Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent.

Reni Eddo-Lodge

They told me there was very little racial prejudice in Hawaii. Like a woman is just a little bit pregnant.

Dick Gregory

It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the Moon as to put a bone in your nose.

William A. Henry III

I felt sick with hatred then for my own people. If you had asked me why I hated them, I might have said that I hated them for being so loud and for being so drunk. But now I believe I hated them for suddenly being my people, not just other people. In the United States, it is very easy for me to forget that the people around me are my people. It is easy, with all our divisions, to think of myself as an outsider in my own country. I have been taught, and I have learned well, I realize now, to think of myself as distinctly different from other white folks - more educated, more articulate, less crude. But in Mexico these distinctions became as meaningless to me as they should have always been.

Eula Biss

He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. . . 'And when they discover their mistake, I mean, truly discover it, it'll be as big as when they learned the world was, in fact, round. It'll open up a whole new world. And nothing will ever be the same.

Danzy Senna

It’s not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys, it’s homophobia. It’s not the color of their skin that makes life harder for people of color; it’s racism. It’s not having vaginas that makes life harder for women, it’s sexism. And it’s ageism, far more than the passage of time, that makes growing older harder for all of us.

Ashton Applewhite

Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. "Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There's a fackin' q

David Mitchell

You and I both know, deep in your heart, you agree with me. And I will prove it with one hypothetical scenario: you are alone in a closet of your home. There`s a bright red button. You can push that button and presto all Negroes and Jews and all other colored people are instantly removed from the North American continent and returned to their native countries.You`d push it, wouldn`t you whitey?See? See? See? in the final analysis, you agree with me.But of course, you wouldn`t do antything to bring that scenario about, or any other scenario favorable to your Race.

Frazier Glenn Miller

Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.

Salman Rushdie

You can only rule over a subject race, especially when you are in a small minority, if you honestly believe yourself to be racially superior, and it helps towards this if you can believe that the subject race is biologically different.

George Orwell

The other thing you can do is write a strong personal essay which lets admissions people inside your life, your heart, and your world....Anyway, it can be hard to figure out what to write about, so here are a few suggestions:...5. Reasons it's wrong to be racist even though it makes sense to you.

Eugene Mirman

It's very difficult not to come across as a white supremacist when there are so many black inferiorists around.

David Bullard

All right, Schwartz, tackle my mind now. Go as deep as you want. I was born on Baronn in the Sirius Sector. I lived my life in an atmosphere of anti-Terrestrialism in the formative years, so I can't help what flaws and follies lie at the roots of my subconscious. But look on the surface and tell me if, in my adult years, I have not fought bigotry in myself. Not in others; that would be easy. But in myself, and as hard as I could.

Isaac Asimov

By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew—and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control it. I like to think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away. I like to think this, but I can’t promise it. The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines. But far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.

Hannah Arendt

He seemed to hasten the retreat of departing light by his very presence; the setting sun dipped sharply, as though fleeing before our nigger; a black mist emanated from him; a subtle and dismal influence; a something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil. The circle broke up. The joy of laughter died on stiffened lips.

Joseph Conrad

She didn't tell him white folks couldn't love the same as coloreds. She couldn't love the same neither though, cuz more than half of her was white.

Shannon Celebi

The Indian temperament is so excitable, you know.

Saul Bellow

... Mr Jellyband was indeed a typical rural John Bull of those days --- the days when our prejudiced insularity was at its height, when to an Englishman, be he lord, yeoman, or peasant, the whole of the continent of Europe was a den of immorality and the rest of the world an unexploited land of savages and cannibals.

Emmuska Orczy

If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today - even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement - invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death.

Frank B. Wilderson III

No matter how much Steve and I preached about staying legal, most of these men never believed us, and some would grin or wink as we spoke.They thought the CKKKK was like the Klan group their grandfathers belonged to back in the 1920's or 30's, when members could get by with just about anything.That ignorance about the CKKKK extended to the masses of people as well.I received hundreds of phone calls from people wanting me to go out and assault this or that person, for wrongs perceived by the callers.One 65 year old White man called, and after informing me his wife of 67 had left him and moved in with a younger man, demanded that I get some men together and, as the caller put it, "Go Klux 'em," meaning to commit some violent act upon them.A Black girl from Angier called once, saying her boyfriend was dating a White girl, and asked me, "Whut you gone do bout it?"Another elderly White lady called and said that her Black maid was stealing her jewelry, as if that was a classic crime for which the CKKKK should render traditional and just "Klan punishment."It's really incredible.

Frazier Glenn Miller

In 1924 Mao took a Chinese friend, newly arrived from Europe, to see the notorious sign in the Shanghai park, 'Chinese and Dogs Not Allowed'.

Paul Johnson

I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist.

Jack London

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

Anna Quindlen

So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe.

Tim Wise

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Racism Quotes - Page 8

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