Top 100 Quotes About Racism In America
#1. I would not be standing here today if my skin were white or my religion were Presbyterian. I am here today only because my skin is yellow and my religion is Unification Church. The ugliest things in this beautiful country of America are religious bigotry and racism.
Sun Myung Moon
#3. Racial superiority isn't real. It is delusional fiction created by ignorant people.
Jonathan Heatt
#4. 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
#5. I'm dying twice as fast
as any other American
between eighteen and thirty-five
This disturbs me,
but I try not to show it in public.
Essex Hemphill
#7. It's no longer time to take sides for or against race, rather sides against those who still do.
Brian Spellman
#8. The problem is, there is no geographical cure. No matter where we (Black American Folk) go, we are still too plugged into this place. Our cousins, grandmothers, aunts, nieces will be in this place. And the second we start looking at it as a "them" problem, we become another problem.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#9. As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s 'the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.'
David T. Hardy
#10. I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea.
Neil Peart
#11. I think that America certainly has racism, I think that any industrialized country does. But when you see how many million fans Barack Obama has who are not black, it would lead one to the conclusion that millions of Americans are in fact not burdened by the albatross of racism.
Henry Rollins
#12. By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.
Bill Cosby
#13. 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.
#14. The loudest of doomsayers, so often, carry the weightiest of sin.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#15. 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
#16. Unfortunately there is no vaccination to protect the soul from the menacing disease of social ignorance manifested by character-void homosapiens.
Tracey Bond
#17. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#18. There's an inexplicable joy that exists on a brown child's face and in the way they navigate their world long before they discover they're hated.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#19. Before the constitution can protect the people it must first protect the person.
T. Rafael Cimino
#20. All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbours was that, if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white.
Harper Lee
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. You could feel America starting to ease up a little bit on racism, against blacks in certain pockets, and then suddenly The Cosby Show bubbled up and it was the right time for it.
Adam McKay
#24. Telling me that I'm obsessed with talking about racism in America is like telling me I'm obsessed with swimming when I'm drowning.
Hari Kondabolu
#25. ... as a reminder that a white man could still kill him for nothing.
Yaa Gyasi
#26. It's hard to imagine hate that I am facing from allover the world yet I am not alone with mistakes.
Auliq Ice
#29. The enemy was not the Klan but the inside-outside lock that racism and classism had on the minds of the people: It operated from the inside through self-hate and self-doubt, and from the outside through the police, carnivorous landlords, and the welfare system.
Junius Williams
#30. A white leftist Mexican activist isn't the same in the media as the son of a farmer in Guerrero, they aren't worth the same. In the same imaginary of the Latin American Left exists a racism, a racism that corresponds to processes of colonialism internal to almost all countries in Latin America.
Bocafloja
#31. 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.
#32. Whites saying 'make America white again' is like millionaires saying 'make the wealthy rich again.
DaShanne Stokes
#33. If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys.
Toni Morrison
#34. 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
#35. When I walk in, they may like me or dislike me, but everybody knows I'm here
Maya Angelou
#37. Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.
Aberjhani
#38. I live in racist America and I'm uneducated, yet a lot of people love me and like what I do, and I can make a living from it. You can't do much better than that.
Richard Pryor
#39. America's put American Black Folks in such a bad position, empty plates and glasses now get us full.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#40. 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
#41. They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn't make them subhuman.
You are telling them Jesus loves them, but not much.
Harper Lee
#42. I'm inspired by people like Nelson Mandela. Can you imagine - you know how racist America was back then - imagine how racism was in South Africa when he had to stand up and say what he had to say. That's bravery beyond comprehension.
Nas
#43. I am disappointed that after all of the struggles that we have had in this country for such a long time, trying to get through and beyond racism and bigotry and discrimination - I think it is sad. It just tells us the kind of work that we have to do as - as America, as a nation.
Bernie Sanders
#44. In African American culture, class bias is the handmaiden of intraracial prejudice that privileges the near-white or light-complexioned person over the darker-hued.
Rita B. Dandridge
#45. If "RACE" becomes the norm, then harmony will not prevail.
Henry Johnson Jr
#46. Becoming unremarkable, invisible, compliant--these were useful tricks for a black man in a white neighborhood. Survival techniques.
Victor LaValle
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. For many years, I believed racism in America was dead and that opportunity existed for all. My beliefs were shaken when the Rodney King officers were acquitted.
John Hope Bryant
#50. 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
#51. They hate you not because of what you have done but because of who you are; you are different from who they are, and you are occupying the ground they want for themselves.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#52. 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
#53. I can honestly say that in my time in America, I have not encountered any racism. When Jim Thorpe and I make fun of each other on the range, or even when a white player makes a joke about my color, I take it as what it is-a joke-and give it back accordingly.
Vijay Singh
#54. It wasn't just Adnan being indicted at this grand jury proceeding, it wasn't just him being prosecuted. His faith, his ethnicity, his community--they were all on trial.
Rabia Chaudry
#55. Segmentation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.
Coretta Scott King
#57. It's infuriating that yesterday, my father had to pull all my younger cousins into a room and tell them to be more careful. He had to explain that in some cases, their brown skin convicts them before an offense is even committed.
Janelle Gray
#58. 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
#59. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#60. 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
#61. Pull down your pants! I've heard about nigger-cocks my whole life but never seen one!
Stephen King
#62. Africans who immigrate to America know how little racism exists there. They suspect it before emigrating from Africa, and they know it after arriving in America. Indeed, America, the Left's depiction of it notwithstanding, is the least racist country in the world.
Dennis Prager
#63. I don't believe there's a white man in this country, baby, who can get his dick hard, without he hear some nigger moan.
James Baldwin
#64. Many people who are drawn to work about racism and transphobia may be new to thinking deeply about colonialism and indigenous resistance in their North America.
Dean Spade
#66. The lessons of the past suggest that racism and resentment against people of color will continue to flourish in America as long as the history that is taught transposes the heroes and the villains. That is the unspoken truth at the heart of the nation's racial divide.
Susan L. Taylor
#67. I have nothing to do with racism in America; it was here when I got here.
Paul Mooney
#68. What stands out to me in America was all the police vs. citizens turmoil. It's decades of bad policing, bad schooling, racism, bigotry and other factors finally spilling into mainstream culture. I would like to see America evolve on how the laws are enforced on the streets.
Henry Rollins
#69. I think the clearest manifestation for anyone who doubts that racism and classism exist in America, all one need do is take a real serious objective look at our criminal justice system.
Tim McDonald
#70. It used to be that a man could keep out of trouble if he behaved himself. Now he will only keep out of trouble if he behaves himself, the police behave themselves, and court behaves itself.
Agona Apell
#72. Only God can break through the variegated walls of skin to capture the one and only hue of the heart. One Blood.
Katelyne Parker
#73. This world that we live in would be perfect if there were less prejudice and people who think they are better than others.
Werley Nortreus
#74. The point of racism is to dehumanize those targeted by the racism. Violence as a reaction to injustice provides ammunition to racists.
The Prophet Of Life
#75. In the midst of combat, we learned a great deal about mankind and its many different races, creeds and beliefs.
Carlos Wallace
#76. I have experienced racism in this country. My children have experienced racism in this country. I wouldn't say America is against me. It is not an either/or proposition. But there are some people who hold fast to certain religious beliefs.
James Peterson
#77. There is something wrong with the world if I'm writing a book outside and people think I'm planning an attack due to my skin color.
Daniel Marques
#78. Racial hatred in America still exists but never was it anything like the time immediately after the Civil War. The western history of our nation would not be complete without the story of former slaves that helped develop the unique character of the West.
William Silverman
#79. When a rainbow spreads across the sky it is reminding the world that beauty comes in all colors.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#80. Our fight against racism should not be a matter of black and white, but good and evil.
Kathy McClary
#81. The black people's struggle has vanquished racism. It was God who created colour. Today Obama, a son of Kenya, a son of Africa, has made it in the United States of America.
Muammar Al-Gaddafi
#83. People buy into this false notion of reverse racism, where they believe that just because there's a group of people getting together to share something about their heritage that we're excluding white people. But that's not the reality.
Simon S. Tam
#84. 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
#85. I found there's a fairly blatant racism in America that's already there, and I don't think I noticed it when I lived here as a kid. But when I went back to South Africa, and then it's sort of thrust in your face, and then came back here - I just see it everywhere.
Dave Matthews
#86. In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.
Henry Louis Gates
#87. Laws ostensibly directed at undocumented immigrants inevitably affect the treatment of lawfully present immigrants and citizens who share the ethnic, racial, or national origin characteristics of undocumented immigrants.
Pratheepan Gulasekaram
#88. We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#89. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy.
Ralph Ellison
#90. When the media is controlled by people who runs the world, you are only going to get news that they want you to know. They will paint anther's man country's hero a tyrant, a dictator or a murderer and favor the next just to divide and conquer the people.
Henry Johnson Jr
#91. 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
#92. Calling for an end to hate shouldn't be treated as a punishable offense.
DaShanne Stokes
#93. Me, shooting smut in the back of a speeding van with two white girls--bald cunts, panties around their ankles--is a game of "Pin the Felony on the Negro" waiting to happen.
Tyler Knight
#94. I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it.
Toni Morrison
#95. There are turning points in everyone's life when we have to fight, even if we have to do it by ourselves and in public.
Junius Williams
#96. There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#97. I am still hoping to see an America that would gradually move beyond race, only in times when old ideas would no longer lives and the new will grow with the young generation.
Henry Johnson Jr
#99. 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
#100. If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.
Claudia Rankine
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