Top 100 Quotes About Race And Racism
#1. Each individual has a responsibility to get out of bed, learn their ABCs, learn your math tables, not use race and racism as an excuse.
Henry Louis Gates
#2. Moreover, in removing race and racism from the discussion altogether, we're paving the way for us as one race to call racism what it actually is: sin borne in a heart of pride and prejudice.
David Platt
#3. As a country, we are in a state of denial about issues of race and racism. And too many of our leaders have concluded that the way to remedy racism is to simply stop talking about race.
Lani Guinier
#4. Even when black youth gangs target white strangers on the streets and spew out racial hatred as they batter them and rob them, mayors, police chiefs and the media tiptoe around their racism and many in the media either don't cover these stories or leave out the race and racism involved.
Thomas Sowell
#5. But despite the scarcity of confrontation with whites in our neighborhood, race and racism permeated every aspect of our lives. Our parents taught us that in order to succeed, we 'had to be twice as good as white folks.' We were constantly being prepared to enter a world dominated by whites.
Junius Williams
#6. 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
#7. I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#8. Hitler learned his eugenics from the infamous "Baur-Fischer-Lenz" book that documented American and British eugenics.
A.E. Samaan
#9. Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#10. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.
Thomas Jefferson
#11. When did the very first case of racism even occur? When did such blind hatred devour the souls of men and make them turn on their own brothers and sisters? What ever taught them that it was normal to be such monsters?
Rebecca McNutt
#12. Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.
Gary L. Francione
#14. The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.
Michelle Alexander
#15. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#16. In the past quarter century, we exposed biases against other races and called it racism, and we exposed biases against women and called it sexism. Biases against men we call humor.
Warren Farrell
#17. It's no longer time to take sides for or against race, rather sides against those who still do.
Brian Spellman
#18. 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
#19. Do not look down on any race;
no people have a monopoly on folly,
and do not look up to any race;
no people have a monopoly on wisdom.
One does not please God by his ethnicity;
one pleases God by his deeds.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#20. If we want to think about racism and how it might play out in drug policy, we have to think about the trial of George Zimmerman. We think about the prosecution, when they said "race is not a factor." It's so dishonest.
Carl Hart
#21. In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#22. Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.
Mary McCarthy
#23. The loudest of doomsayers, so often, carry the weightiest of sin.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#24. But if the Negro is so distinctly inferior, it is a strange thing to me that it takes such tremendous effort on the part of the white man to make him realize it, and to keep him in the same place into which inferior men naturally fall.
James Weldon Johnson
#25. 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
#26. One question for me and others like me is whether ... we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance and, if so, what we will do to lessen them.
Peggy McIntosh
#27. It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time.
He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.
Malcolm X
#28. In the white newspapers, they use it against us. They make the Panthers look like we all just want to rip the throats out of some white folks for no good reason. We have good reasons, but we still don't want to do that.
Kekla Magoon
#29. 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
#30. The world is not a great place because racist people come with a race type of agenda, and it don't make the world great, it makes it worst than ever.
Werley Nortreus
#31. I think that racism has gotten more subtle, and it's not even racism anymore: it's placism. Like where you live or whether you went to community college or Harvard, and it exists within the race.
Esai Morales
#32. Americans believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism - the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them - inevitably follows from this inalterable condition.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#33. To deny the existence of races or to replace the word 'race' by a synonym, hoping to produce some effect on the question of racism, displays only bad faith and stupidity.
Andre Pichot
#34. I guess racism is sort of like a form of discrimination but it's just that you classify people in different colours and different races. I think everyone is born with an inherent, the inherence to discriminate.
Pearl Tan
#35. 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
#36. A lot of different races and nationalities play football, so it is a good way to try and stop racism.
Thierry Henry
#37. It's illegal to yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theater, right?" "It is." "Well, I've whispered 'Racism' in a post-racial world.
Paul Beatty
#38. While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me.
Raquel Cepeda
#39. Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#40. In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.
Sarah Churchwell
#41. When black fury meets white denial, you have the combustible and fundamentally changed race relations we live in today.
Ferial Haffajee
#42. The straitjackets of race prejudice and discrimination do not wear only southern labels. The subtle, psychological technique of the North has approached in its ugliness and victimization of the Negro the outright terror and open brutality of the South.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#43. Whites saying 'make America white again' is like millionaires saying 'make the wealthy rich again.
DaShanne Stokes
#44. 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
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#45. I guess it all depends on whom you ask and when you ask. Race, I've learned, is in the eye of the beholder.
Raquel Cepeda
#46. Forget race, forget gender, forget religion, and become a human my friend. Become a human above everything else, and all great things shall follow.
Abhijit Naskar
#47. If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys.
Toni Morrison
#48. Familiar words for dead black boys portrayed as complicit in their own demise. Michael Donald's body had been hanged on a Mobile street, and the police were doing the same thing to his name.
Ravi Howard
#49. Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be?
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#50. Many humans make the mistake of fighting for race when it's the species driving our genes. And there is only one weapon to fight for species: the brain.
Anthony Marais
#51. Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#52. Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.
Aberjhani
#53. America's put American Black Folks in such a bad position, empty plates and glasses now get us full.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#54. 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
#55. When the Dutch ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body. That was the kind of power I sought ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#56. Race was an issue because in every assignment I have had in Special Operations, racism has been as much a part of the social bond as football and fast cars. I never cared for either of them either, but this was special.
Stan Goff
#57. 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
#58. Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.
Harper Lee
#59. Ironically, white America will catapult books about race to the top of the best-seller list, even as racism remains a national open wound. Obsession ain't solution, however, because reading even at its most intense and verisimilitudinous is vicarious, and once you close the book you're off the hook.
Marita Golden
#60. The meetings and marches and vigils are cool, but if the enemy isn't present, you're just talking slick to a can of oil.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#61. If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois's famous words, "the problem of the color line," then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification.
Naomi Murakawa
#62. Becoming unremarkable, invisible, compliant--these were useful tricks for a black man in a white neighborhood. Survival techniques.
Victor LaValle
#63. 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
#64. Our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body, it must somehow be your fault. Trayvon Martin's hoodie got him killed. Jordan Davis's loud music did the same.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#65. The crisis created by an inability to distinguish the Bible on race from the Bible on slavery meant that when the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished, systemic racism continued unchecked as the great moral anomaly in a supposedly Christian America.
Mark A. Noll
#66. race has the feel of being a priori, but in reality it is a historical construct that regulates our interhuman relations, though not always toward malicious forms of racism. Indeed, race may also enable forms of community bound by filial care and interests.
Victor Anderson
#67. 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
#69. 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
#71. Word: I'm not saying the races don't have a common human bond. I'm just saying that bond isn't about compassion and equality and tolerance. What we all share together is the drive to get what's ours and keep it for as long as we can.
Snoop Dogg
#72. When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose.
Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
#73. Beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who screams is not a dancing bear.
Aime Cesaire
#74. The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy
R. Buckminster Fuller
#75. Ask yourself this question: Of this had been a white child found dead in a black neighborhood, would they be knocking on every door? 'Yes, sir.' Searching high and low? 'Yes, indeed.' It this had been a white child, would they paint him as a sinner and not a saint? 'Lord, no...
Ravi Howard
#76. Iberals see racism where it doesn't exist, fabricate it when they can't find it and ignore it within their own ranks.
Michelle Malkin
#77. Harrison, Arkansas, a town of 12,000, which is over 90% White, has a 'Task Force On Race Relations', and elected city officials invite the NAACP in from the other (black) end of the state to hold parades and bury caskets labeled 'racism'.
Billy Roper
#78. American newspapers frequently offered praise for eugenics just prior to WWII and The Holocaust .... that is, until Hitler revealed what eugenics really looked like. They avoided the subject for decades thereafter.
A.E. Samaan
#79. The act of claiming an identity can be transformational. It can provide healing and empowerment. It can weld solidarity within a community. And, perhaps most importantly, it can diminish power from an oppressor, a dominant group.
Simon Tam
#80. Racism is not dead, but it is on life support
kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as 'racists'
Thomas Sowell
#82. Only God can break through the variegated walls of skin to capture the one and only hue of the heart. One Blood.
Katelyne Parker
#83. In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.
Trevor Noah
#84. Being Latino means being from everywhere, and that is exactly what America is supposed to be about.
Raquel Cepeda
#85. In the midst of combat, we learned a great deal about mankind and its many different races, creeds and beliefs.
Carlos Wallace
#86. Within the context of the clubs, and perhaps the sex business as a whole, the issue of race becomes very complicated because you can't force someone to pay for something - or someone - that they don't want, whether their desire - or lack thereof - is motivated by racism or not.
Craig Seymour
#87. When a rainbow spreads across the sky it is reminding the world that beauty comes in all colors.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Moses and the children of Israel were the same, and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had to be spilled in order that the black race might cross into the Promised Land.
William Faulkner
#91. This film isn't about "white racism", or racism at all. DEAR WHITE PEOPLE is about identity. It's about the difference between how the mass culture responds to a person because of their race and who they understand themselves to truly be. And this societal conflict appears to be one that many share.
Justin Simien
#92. I have always been very concerned that Darwinism gave the basic okay to terrible racism and to the idea of murder based upon race.
Ben Stein
#93. Yeah, race exists. Racism is still here, and it's doing well. Turn on the news. I don't think me and my comedy can really change that.
Tracy Morgan
#94. The science fiction author, H.G. Wells was an avid supporter of eugenics and a believer in a hierarchy of the races.
A.E. Samaan
#95. If racism can't be shown to be natural then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate those conditions.
Howard Zinn
#96. In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.
Harry A. Blackmun
#97. Does anyone in this room have it?"
"No, Chris, no one here has it."
"How do you know?"
"Because the mark was dark skin. Negroes are the descendants of Cain."
I didn't have my civil-rights sensibilities yet, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about God ...
Chris Crutcher
#98. Race should be seen in one way, and one way only: on your marks, get set, go!
Anthony Marais
#99. There's sort of a persistent misperception that talking about race is black folk's burden. Ultimately, only men can end sexism, and only white people can end racism.
Benjamin Todd Jealous
#100. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.
Toni Morrison
