Top 67 African Race Quotes
#1. Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.
Abraham Lincoln
#2. Many politicians and preachers defended slavery, citing the Bible's approval of the practice, the inferiority of the African race, the value of preserving the southern way of life, and a paternalistic concern that freed slaves could not survive on their own.
Steven Pinker
#3. Every intelligent person whose life has been passed in a slaveholding State, and who has carefully observed the character and capacity of the African race, will see that a general and sudden emancipation would be absolute ruin to the Negroes, as well as to the white population.
Roger B. Taney
#4. It is with the oppressed, enslaved, African race that I cast in my lot; and if I wished anything, I would wish myself two shades darker, rather than one lighter.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#5. I am of the African race, and in the colour which is natural to them of the deepest dye; and it is under a sense of the most profound gratitude to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.
Benjamin Banneker
#6. For their abuse of [the Black African] race, the whites will be cursed, unless they repent.
Brigham Young
#8. The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese.
Che Guevara
#9. Every day in America, African Americans are reminded of their race in ways large and small. Every day.
Jennifer Granholm
#10. In 1985, in Batson v. Kentucky, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits prosecutors from discriminating on the basis of race when selecting juries, a ruling hailed as an important safeguard against all-white juries locking up African Americans based on racial biases and stereotypes.
Michelle Alexander
#11. There clearly is a serious race problem in the country. Just take a look at what's happening to African American communities. For example wealth, wealth in African American communities is almost zero. The history is striking.
Noam Chomsky
#12. The perception of linked fate and that feeling of being always on the spot as a representative of the race, at least in mixed company, are features of African American life that predate affirmative action and arise outside of its presence.
Randall Kennedy
#13. This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America
Paul Robeson
#14. People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.
Jamaica Kincaid
#15. I think others may look at the uniqueness of my candidacy, the fact that I'm an African-American, conservative tea party Republican, and somehow race injects itself into the conversation.
Niger Innis
#16. Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl's hair. And I wish to God I could buy black hair products from black people for once. How we going to make it in this country if we don't make our own business?
Zadie Smith
#17. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.
James Baldwin
#18. The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.
Richard Wright
#19. Her father was an intimidating man who held fast to his belief in his African heritage; that black should not marry white to avoid racial confusion. She was in love with a white man whose mother wished to keep her family's heritage intact by not crossbreeding with another race.
Katherine Vogel
#20. America's put American Black Folks in such a bad position, empty plates and glasses now get us full.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#21. 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
#22. Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.
Aberjhani
#23. With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.
Shawn Johnson
#24. A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man,
a denizen of the woods. "The pale white man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him.
Henry David Thoreau
#25. It's one thing when other African-Americans try to threaten my race card, but when people outside of my ethnicity have the audacity to question how 'down' I am because of the bleak, stereotypical picture pop culture has painted for me as a black woman? Unacceptable.
Issa Rae
#26. I don't believe for a minute anybody allowed people to suffer because they are African Americans, Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race.
Condoleezza Rice
#27. As we women know, there are so many other hurdles that we have to cross that I would love it if we could stop having the race conversation so that we can get women further on. You know, a female president now that we have an African American president. Maybe we can get an Asian female, a gay person?
Octavia Spencer
#28. 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
#29. I always root for the black man, like penance for something I had not part in creating.
J.M. August
#30. To be a black male is to be always at war, and no flight to the county can save us, because even there we are met by the assupmtion of violence, by the specter of who we might turn on next.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#31. A tightrope walker uncertain if he could make it to the other side probably would not. A race car driver wondering if he was taking a turn too fast was likely to lose control. If a man feared death, whether his own or the taking of another's, death would surely come calling.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. An oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household ... carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.
Susan B. Anthony
#36. Crime is fast destroying the moral fabric of South African cities, and is becoming a major threat to South African democracy as well as the prominent manifestation of a "class war" that is largely a continuation of the "race war" of yesterday.
Achille Mbembe
#37. Whenever a word 'nigga' is spoken, It's always followed by the same question, Can white people say nigger ?
and the correct answer is Not really.
Auliq A
#38. He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them. The southern white man was spat from the loins of the devil and there was no way to forecast his next evil act.
Colson Whitehead
#39. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?
Philip Dray
#40. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#41. I never said I wasn't Black ... I want to make that very clear. I said, I am not African-American. I never expected my personal beliefs and comments to spark such emotion in people. I think it is only positive when we can openly discuss race and being labeled in America.
Raven-Symone
#42. I feel like because black Cuban artists don't have the kind of pressure to thematize race in the way that African-American artists do, there's more space for them to do their art without having to discuss it in terms of racial identity.
Rachael Price
#44. I am half Puerto Rican, a quarter German and a quarter black. That was always a big issue for me - being mixed race - because casting directors tended to be very like, 'OK, are you Hispanic for this role?' 'Or is she going to be African American?'
Naya Rivera
#45. We have this American president, Obama, born of an African father, who is saying we will not give you aid if you don't embrace homosexuality. We ask, was he born out of homosexuality? We need continuity in our race, and that comes from the woman, and no to homosexuality.
Robert Mugabe
#46. The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has not interest, and pretends none, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual.
Zora Neale Hurston
#47. People of color, particularly African Americans, feel the stigma more keenly. In a race-conscious society, some don't want to be perceived as having yet another deficit.
Bebe Moore Campbell
#48. I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.
Nadine Gordimer
#49. I'm African-American by my culture, not by my color. Race does not exist.
Terry Crews
#50. It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#51. With domestic adoption, you get a form, you fill it out, and there are these boxes: African-American, African-American and Hispanic, and you check the boxes that you're comfortable with. Race is completely open in that regard.
Jennifer Gilmore
#52. It doesn't have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There's a lot you can do with natural hair
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#53. They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.
Thelonious Monk
#54. I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American?
Henry Louis Gates
#55. Affirmative action benefits NO ONE. It discriminates against Asian American and White students, while promoting negative stereotypes about the competency of African American students -- that they only got in because of their race, not merit.
Vijay Jojo Chokal-Ingam
#56. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#57. The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.
Ishmael Reed
#59. Holocaust survivors and their descendants are supposed to hate those who oppressed and killed them and their people. Black people are not. This is how anti-blackness works.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#60. In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.
Eric Foner
#61. I don't want to be a race-transcending leader. I want to be deeply understood as a man, as African- American, as a Christian, all that I am.
Cory Booker
#62. I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.
Paul Beatty
#63. We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.
Henry Louis Gates
#64. I feel that the kinks, curls, or tight coils in Afro hair is beautiful and unique. No other race on this planet has hair like ours - that makes me proud.
Monica Millner
#65. Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#66. I'm so tired of the left trying to divide us by race. One of the things I said today in my speech, we're not Indian-Americans, African-Americans, Irish-Americans, rich Americans, poor Americans. We're all Americans.
Bobby Jindal
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
