Race And Racism In America Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The only thing white about me is the skin I'm wearing.

Randolph Randy Camp

#3. Only God can break through the variegated walls of skin to capture the one and only hue of the heart. One Blood.

Katelyne Parker

#4. In the midst of combat, we learned a great deal about mankind and its many different races, creeds and beliefs.

Carlos Wallace

#5. When a rainbow spreads across the sky it is reminding the world that beauty comes in all colors.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Calling for an end to hate shouldn't be treated as a punishable offense.

DaShanne Stokes

#9. I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts and now they pay me for it.

Toni Morrison

#10. 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

#11. Racism hurts everyone, including racists themselves.

DaShanne Stokes

#12. 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

#13. Long ago, before I met her, she twisted her blond hair into dreadlocks and, pretty as she is, the locks add an allure she wouldn't otherwise have.

Toni Morrison

#14. Racism is pure ignorance. We are part of the same race. The human race

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#15. I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us - Christians, Muslims, atheists - lived in this fear of this truth.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#16. 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

#17. Racism is not a byproduct as much as it's the foundational stock in the American soup.

Luvvie Ajayi

#18. If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.

Angela Y. Davis

#19. The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us.

Chuck D

#20. The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else's children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose.

Aberjhani

#21. Since its founding, Detroit has been a place of perpetual flames. Three times the city has suffered race riots and three times the city has burned to the ground. The city's flag acknowledges as much. Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus: We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes.

Charlie LeDuff

#22. My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes are super cool.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. It's no longer time to take sides for or against race, rather sides against those who still do.

Brian Spellman

#26. 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.

#27. The loudest of doomsayers, so often, carry the weightiest of sin.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#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. It's no disgrace to be black, but it's often very inconvenient.

James Weldon Johnson

#35. Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.

Aberjhani

#36. America's put American Black Folks in such a bad position, empty plates and glasses now get us full.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#37. 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

#38. Becoming unremarkable, invisible, compliant--these were useful tricks for a black man in a white neighborhood. Survival techniques.

Victor LaValle

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.

Octavia E. Butler

#44. 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