Top 100 Quotes About Race Relations
#1. No significant American group hates like the left does. If you differ with them - from global warming, to race relations, to same-sex marriage, to the extent of rape on college campuses - they will humiliate, defame, libel and try to economically crush you.
Dennis Prager
#2. Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can't do? She's channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door.
Caroline Leavitt
#3. In high school, I discovered myself. I was interested in race relations and the legal profession. I read about Lincoln and that he believed the law to be the most difficult of professions.
Constance Baker Motley
#4. I think it's sinful to give the audience material it knows already, whether the material is about race relations or the car culture or the depiction and placement of a candy bar.
Manny Farber
#5. A white person listens to my act and he laughs and he thinks, 'Yeah, that's the way I see it too.' Okay. He's white. I'm Negro. And we both see things the same way. That must mean that we are alike ... So I figure I'm doing as much for good race relations as the next guy.
Bill Cosby
#6. Though President Obama was at his smooth and polished best the other night, two aspects of his worldview came into sharper relief - his reflexive hostility toward and misunderstanding of business and his reliable resort to left-wing fables about race relations.
Mona Charen
#7. The vast majority of Malaysians are sensible people; they're moderates, they want peace, they want harmonious race relations at home. They look for national unity.
Najib Razak
#8. Race relations can be an appropriate issue ... but only if you want to craft solutions, and not catalogue complaints. If we use the issue appropriately, we can transform it from the cancer of our society into the cure.
David Dinkins
#9. Like so much of cool hunting, Hilfiger's marketing journey feeds off the alienation at the heart of America's race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth.
Naomi Klein
#10. The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.
Jamaica Kincaid
#11. When black fury meets white denial, you have the combustible and fundamentally changed race relations we live in today.
Ferial Haffajee
#12. It's a weird scene. You win a few baseball games and all of a sudden you're surrounded by reporters and TV men with cameras asking you about Vietnam and race relations.
Vida Blue
#13. Racial dialogues are microcosms of race relations in the United States; reenact the biases, prejudices, and stereotypes of the wider society; invalidate and punish dissenting voices; and force compliance on groups of color.
Derald Wing Sue
#14. President Obama, when he was elected, he could have been a unifying figure. He could have chosen to be a leader on race relations and bring us together. And he hasn't done that, he's made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions that have divided us rather than bringing us together.
Ted Cruz
#15. What we are working for is an educational program that has become a resource and rallying point for scores of brave southerners who are leading the fight for justice and better race relations in these crucial days
Septima Poinsette Clark
#16. 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
#17. When Thurgood Marshall became a lawyer, race relations in the United States were particularly bad.
Constance Baker Motley
#18. A white person who claims to have no impediment of vision in this country is not, I think, telling the whole truth. And when it comes to race relations, not telling the whole truth about the fog one inhabits slows down the work of groping forward.
Naomi Wolf
#19. The Windrush era is a very important part of British history as it helps us understand how and why we became the multicultural society we are today, and also helps us understand the history of race relations in this country.
Naomie Harris
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. We understand 'Roots,' and that experience was mind-boggling, and it changed the way society viewed race relations. It was incredibly important. With 'Roots,' I was just as proud as anybody else that people of color were getting their stories told.
Esai Morales
#23. If you care to define the South as a poor, rural region with lousy race relations, that South survives only in geographical shreds and patches and most Southerners don't live there any more.
John Shelton Reed
#24. The changes in thinking about same-sex marriage have come slowly at first and then in rapid course. If such change is possible in this area, is it also possible in the vexed and sordid realm of race relations?
Barack Obama
#25. Hip hop culture has done more for race relations in American than anything since Martin Luther King. And I really believe that.
Steve Stoute
#26. I think that the opportunity to improve race relations in the United States has been put off temporarily.
Stephen Ambrose
#27. When you are honest in your comedy, you have to acknowledge the world that you're in. Through a comedic voice, you're talking about what needs to be talked about, whether it's race relations or politics or anything that's happening on a global or an American scale.
Trevor Noah
#28. One of the less dismaying aspects of race relations in the United States is that their improvement is not a matter of a few people having a great deal of courage. It is a matter of a great many people having just a little courage.
Margaret Halsey
#29. I believe in terms of the work that I do, in establishing dialogue about race relations in Latin America, steps on one of the most relevant themes today.
Bocafloja
#30. Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don't think it's given the proper credit. It has changed America immensely. I'm going to make a very bold statement: Hip-hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations.
Jay-Z
#31. I majored in Southern history in college, and much of my early work at my first job - as a staff writer at 'Memphis' magazine - focused on race relations.
Hampton Sides
#32. The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so sensitive.
Clint Eastwood
#33. Sabotage did not involve loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations. Bitterness would be kept to a minimum and, if the policy bore fruit, democratic government could become a reality.
Nelson Mandela
#34. Here's the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.
Anonymous
#35. We are not race blind. Of course we still have racial tensions in this country. But the United States of America has made enormous progress in race relations, and it is still the best place on Earth to be a minority.
Condoleezza Rice
#36. Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another?
Joyce Carol Oates
#37. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.
James Baldwin
#38. What good's a black face if it means I'm just someone else's property? Why give me these arms and legs just to carry someone else's load, not my own?
Stacey Lee
#39. 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
#40. 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.
#41. Whiteness has been, above all, a racial formation that presupposed and reproduced relations of inequality and domination between "whites" and their racial others.
Moon-kie Jung
#42. We do not admire their president.
We know why the White House is white.
We do not find their children irresistible;
We do not agree they should inherit the earth.
Alice Walker
#43. [T]he most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy, but rejecting his definition of you.
Azar Nafisi
#44. It's no longer time to take sides for or against race, rather sides against those who still do.
Brian Spellman
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. If we love each other without creating a race war, people wouldn't get hurt that much, and feelings too.
Werley Nortreus
#48. You Bet Your Life's sponsor, Chrysler, was convinced only a Commie would dare promote racial equality.
Kliph Nesteroff
#49. Neighbor is no longer confined to the vocabulary of the individual. It is a national word. Modern inventions have annihilated distance. Commercial relations have broken down barriers of race and religion, and the family of nations is a recognized fact.
David Josiah Brewer
#50. I was learning that just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.
Dick Gregory
#51. 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
#52. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. The reason we life black people isn't because they're black. We like them because they're not as grey as we are.
John Cage
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. If we really want "Racial Harmony" in this country, it is time we start judging individuals by the standards of their behaviors and by the criteria of the law, not by the pigmentation of their skin or the past sins or struggles of their forefathers.
Henry Johnson Jr
#61. 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
#63. I don't want to, in any way, characterize a race or a people or get accused of racial profiling, but the Irish, as lyrical and romantic as they can be in their poetry, they can be every bit as repressed in their personal relations.
Stephen Lang
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. We never asked for racism or white supremacy but rather Whites admit that we have always been another shade of humanity.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
#67. From the isolated, individualistic perspective of most white evangelicals and many other Americans, there really is no race problem other than bad interpersonal relationships.
Christian Smith
#68. 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
#69. Whites saying 'make America white again' is like millionaires saying 'make the wealthy rich again.
DaShanne Stokes
#70. When he asked if she was okay, her eyes welled with tears and she said, Like I'm always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.
Rebecca Skloot
#71. You're not a bad man or a stupid man, what you are is a white man.
Barbra-Lee Stephen
#72. They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.
Thelonious Monk
#73. Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#74. Becoming conscious of racism does not mean you are a racist.
Auliq Ice
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Under the white population of the United States of America only the reactionary classes oppres 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 Tse-tung
#78. 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
#79. 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
#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. 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
#82. By the time she a year old Mae Mobley following me around everwhere I go ... .Miss Leefolt, she'd narrow up her eyes at me like I done something wrong, unhitch that crying baby off my foot. I reckon that's the risk you run, letting somebody else raise you chilluns
Kathryn Stockett
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise
and inexplicably
to be envied.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Race is there. You're tire of hearing about it? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it.
Jon Stewart
#91. Not even God who made us all can kill everybody at once. He kills people one by one, and the more he kills the more people are gonna be born and grow up and go on being born and growing up and mixing, and no son-of-a-bitch is gonna stop 'em!
Jorge Amado
#92. Tea to the English is really picnic indoors. Plenty of sandwiches and cookies and of course hot tea. We all used the same cups and plates. (Walker 2000: 116)
Alice Walker
#94. It was around this time that I started thinking about how skin color defined class. The cowboy movies that fueled the goodness of 'White' reinforced attaching 'darkness' to a class. I finally took notice that the crayon color called 'flesh' did not match mine.
Luis Quiros
#95. Only God can break through the variegated walls of skin to capture the one and only hue of the heart. One Blood.
Katelyne Parker
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. You and I have to rejoice that we have not to answer for our fathers' crimes, neither shall we do right to charge them one to another. We can only regret it, and flee from it, and from henceforth, let peace and righteousness be written upon our hearts and hands forever.
William Apess
#99. 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
#100. In the midst of combat, we learned a great deal about mankind and its many different races, creeds and beliefs.
Carlos Wallace
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