Top 100 Quotes About Race In America
#2. The question 'Why white kids love hip-hop?' forces us immediately to deal with the historical weight of race in America. On the surface people see hip-hop and race as nothing new. I think the ways young white Americans are engaging hip-hop suggest something more.
Bakari Kitwana
#3. A lot of people want to change the world, but only a few people want to change themselves. When it comes to the issue of race in America, we have to do both.
Bill Bradley
#4. I started a lecture series that was inspired by my reporting on race in America. The 'Black in America' series launched on CNN in 2007 as an opportunity to freshen the national conversation on race.
Soledad O'Brien
#5. There is certainly greatness in the '60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue. They didn't just stand up and salute when told to go to war. Women finally began to realize a more equal place in our society.
Tom Brokaw
#6. 'Get Out' takes on the task of exploring race in America, something that hasn't really been done within the genre since 'Night of the Living Dead' 47 years ago.
Jordan Peele
#7. Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.
Wendell Willkie
#8. 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
#9. I always tell young people in particular, "Do not say that nothing's changed when it comes to race in America unless you lived through being a black man in the 1950s, or '60s, or '70s."
Barack Obama
#10. It's not that white guys shouldn't be allowed to engage in discussions on race in America. But there's nothing more exhausting than white male liberals' dogmatisms on race that were clearly formed during a conversation they had with that one black guy they met back in college.
John Ridley
#11. Race in America has always centered on our mutual agreement not to see each other. White or non-white. Black or non-black. Mongoloid, Hindoo. We've always bought into to the crudest, humanity-denying forms of sorting.
Eric Liu
#12. In nothing was slavery so savage and relentless as in its attempted destruction of the family instincts of the Negro race in America. Individuals, not families; shelters, not homes; herding, not marriages, were the cardinal sins in that system of horrors.
Fannie Barrier Williams
#13. There has been, and there will continue to be, vigorous discussions about race in America. I worry that little will come of these discussions because we aren't addressing what must be done to change the current racial climate.
Roxane Gay
#14. Race in America is not a problem you can go over, or around or under. You've got to go through it.
Mitch Landrieu
#15. The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.
Cornel West
#16. I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.
Richard Rodriguez
#17. 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
#18. I would love to see an America where race is understood in the same way that the ethnic diversity of the white population is understood.
Barack Obama
#19. 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
#21. The crisis in America that we barely notice anymore is that we've become two nations - divided by poverty, opportunity, and race. It's like a neighbor's car alarm that we don't hear anymore because it rings so often.
Arianna Huffington
#22. In America, you're just an American. You're accepted. It doesn't matter that you're of whatever race. If anything, I'm British, and that's it. So let's just get on with it, really.
Benedict Wong
#23. 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
#24. It's no longer time to take sides for or against race, rather sides against those who still do.
Brian Spellman
#25. If the union between England and America is a powerful factor in the cause of peace, a new Triple Alliance between the Teutonic race and the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race will be a still more potent influence in the future of the world.
Edward Grey
#26. The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.
Samuel Eliot Morison
#27. Yessir, some things is sin 'cause God says so. Some things is sin 'cause they hurt other people. And some things is just pure-dee stupid.
David Hopper
#28. This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.
Langston Hughes
#29. 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.
#30. I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise. I think people in America sold out very cheaply, for sneakers and cheeseburgers. And I don't think it's fixable
George Carlin
#31. The loudest of doomsayers, so often, carry the weightiest of sin.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#32. 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
#33. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#34. To have built up a new organization, which was not purely political, among Negroes in America was a wonderful feat, for the Negro politician does not allow any other kind of organization within his race to thrive.
Marcus Garvey
#35. I decided to try to make a show of my own where I could invite an audience to obsess about race the way I sometimes do. So it was an attempt to dig into the race and history in America, and to make it personal and dramatic.
Steven C. Harper
#36. People of color are allowed, even required to perform, and, especially these days on issues of race, to edify as well.
'Here you are, now entertain us'.
But are we allowed to lead?
Jeff Chang
#37. The enormous success of 2009's 'The Blind Side,' in which Sandra Bullock makes a black teenager one of the family, demonstrates that America isn't post-racial. It is thoroughly mired in race - the myths that surround it, the guilt it inspires, the discomfort it causes, the struggle to transcend it.
Wesley Morris
#38. 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
#39. Yes, I'm an extremist. The Black race here in North America is in extremely bad condition. You show me a Black man who isn't an extremist and I'll show you one who needs psychiatric attention.
Malcolm X
#40. If America is to be strong in the future, Americans must see America as home, not divided by race or region. Build American jobs for the future and come together with compassion to solve problems.
Phil Mitchell
#41. I don't think people in America understand race, and how deep the hooks of whiteness there are in our consciousness.
Eddie Huang
#42. 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
#43. Race is a part of every conversation in America, whether you know it or not.
Paul Singer
#44. I do not admit ... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia ... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race ... has come in and taken its place.
Winston Churchill
#45. 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
#46. For me, Barack Obama's election was a milestone of the most extraordinary kind. On the day he was elected I felt such hope in my heart. I thought we were seeing the beginning of a new era of equal opportunity across race and gender such as America had never known before.
Jesse Jackson
#47. I think in terms of the themes that I have worked on most is establishing questions of race in the context of Latin America. This is a theme that makes uncomfortable a lot of people, and it obviously makes the Latin American Left uncomfortable.
Bocafloja
#48. I think there's a racial outcome to a lot of what goes in America, but I don't think race is always the reason.
Rand Paul
#49. We need to guarantee equal rights and civil rights and say that, here in America, workers have the right to organize - women have the right to choose - and justice belongs to everyone regardless of race or gender or sexual orientation.
John F. Kerry
#50. 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
#51. So that's it," he said. "Three hundred dollars. I wish somebody would come into this country with a seed that had to be worked everyday from New Year's right on through Christmas. As soon as you niggers are laid-by, trouble starts.
William Faulkner
#52. ... as a reminder that a white man could still kill him for nothing.
Yaa Gyasi
#53. If every major city in America went up in the flames of race riots tonight, how ready would you be?
Billy Roper
#54. Lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications
Charles Dickens
#55. The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.
Jamaica Kincaid
#56. There was a time in America not long ago when rock 'n' roll was called race music, and white kids who wanted to go see Chuck Berry were completely forbidden.
David Bowie
#57. In colleges throughout America, students are taught to have disdain for the white race. I know this sounds incredible, or at least exaggerated. It is neither.
Dennis Prager
#58. 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.
#59. People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received
Charles Dickens
#60. Rick Perry dropped out of the presidential race. When asked what went wrong, Perry said, I guess America is not ready to elect a dumb guy from Texas. But in time.
Conan O'Brien
#61. What I'm asking is will watching The Discovery
Channel with my young black boy instead
of the news coverage of the riot funerals riot arrests
riot nothing changes riots be enough to keep him
from harm?
Jennifer Givhan
#62. Whites saying 'make America white again' is like millionaires saying 'make the wealthy rich again.
DaShanne Stokes
#63. The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics.
Bryan Stevenson
#64. If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys.
Toni Morrison
#65. I would rather be a one-term President and do what I believe is right than to be a two-term President at the cost of seeing America become a second-race power and to see this Nation accept the first defeat in its proud 190-year history.
Richard M. Nixon
#66. 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
#67. I do not apologize for the takeover of the region by the Jews from the Palestinians in the same way I don't apologize for the takeover of America by the whites from the Red Indians or the takeover of Australia from the blacks. It is natural for a superior race to dominate an inferior one.
Winston Churchill
#68. Race is a constant factor in American life. Yet reacting to every incident,real or imagined, is crippling, tiring, and ultimately counterproductive.
Condoleezza Rice
#69. I was born and grew up in the greatest, the noblest achievement of the human race on this planet - which was called the United States of America.
Howard Fast
#71. Yesterday Jerry Springer bowed out of the Ohio Senate race. He said, 'If I can't run the most embarrassing campaign in America, then I'm out of here.'
Craig Kilborn
#72. Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.
Aberjhani
#73. I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.
James Weldon Johnson
#74. America's put American Black Folks in such a bad position, empty plates and glasses now get us full.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#75. 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
#76. The Negro has been here in America since 1619, a total of 344 years. He is not going anywhere else; this country is his home. He wants to do his part to help make his city, state, and nation a better place for everyone, regardless of color and race.
Medgar Evers
#77. in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren't. Funnily
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#78. If "RACE" becomes the norm, then harmony will not prevail.
Henry Johnson Jr
#79. Becoming unremarkable, invisible, compliant--these were useful tricks for a black man in a white neighborhood. Survival techniques.
Victor LaValle
#80. J.W. and Roy didn't just snatch the childhood away from Emmett; they stole it from every single black child in Mississippi.
Bernice L. McFadden
#81. In Barack Obama, we have a great education president who is rebuilding America. His Race to the Top program is doing more to 'spur us' to improve our public schools than anything we've ever done as a nation.
Jim Hunt
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. We Muslims believe that the white race, which is guilty of having oppressed and exploited and enslaved our people here in America, should and will be the victims of God's divine wrath.
Malcolm X
#85. There was never a promise that race relations in America would be entirely resolved during my presidency or anybody's presidency. I mean, this has been a running thread - and - and fault line in American life and American politics since its founding.
Barack Obama
#86. 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
#87. British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any
Charles Dickens
#89. Passionate ideological opposition to race preferences does not seem to be part of the Bush DNA, and President Bush has been no exception to this rule ... It is not the legitimate business of government in America to promote 'diversity.'
Ward Connerly
#90. 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
#91. Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society.
James Madison
#92. Only blacks can play the race card, apparently; only they think in racial terms, at least to hear white America tell it.
Tim Wise
#93. The Bostonians are really, as a race, far inferior in point of anything beyond mere intellect to any other set upon the continent of North America. They are decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive.
Edgar Allan Poe
#94. My mixed-race background made me a broad person, able to relate to different cultures. But any woman of colour, even a mixed colour, is seen as black in America. So that's how I regard myself.
Alicia Keys
#95. 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
#97. I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them.
James Baldwin
#98. In the last few years, race relations in America have entered upon a period of intensified craziness wherein fear of being called a racist has so thoroughly overwhelmed fear of being a racist that we are in danger of losing sight of the distinction.
Florence King
#99. I tried to balance the sufferings of the miserable victim against the moral degradation of Memphis, and the truth flashed over me that in large measure the race question involves the saving of black America's body and white America's soul.
Philip Dray
#100. Foisting an identity on people rather than allowing them the freedom and space to create their own is shady.
Raquel Cepeda
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