Top 96 White Folks Quotes
#1. You can't even read American fiction to get a sense of how actual life is lived these days. You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#2. I said, 'Oh, I know. If the white folks is in Heaven too, then the black angels were in the kitchen, preparing the milk and honey.'
Muhammad Ali
#3. I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
John Henrik Clarke
#5. So many of the fantasy stories I encountered growing up were set in worlds that were largely modelled on medieval Europe in one way or another. Lots of white folks in feudal societies, castles and kings, that kind of thing.
Chris Roberson
#6. You white folks see UFOs in your dreams. You don't hear about Martians in Harlem.
Paul Mooney
#7. We do wish they'd have the same fervor and monetary backing for, say, a group of black legal gun carriers in Ferguson, Missouri, as they do white folks.
Trae Crowder
#8. My wife says I spend my life trying to teach white folks. I'm not so sure I'm proud of it, but she's right.
Derrick Bell
#9. There won't be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won't be any more white folks around who actually remember them ...
Tim Wise
#10. Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.
Dick Gregory
#11. The first of the month falls every month, too, North or South. And them white folks who sends bills never forgets to send them-the phone bill, the furniture bill, the water bill, the gas bill, insurance, house rent.
Langston Hughes
#12. These critters ain't like white folks, you know; they gets over things, only manage right.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13. It's bad bein' strange niggers wid white folks. Everybody is aginst yuh." "Dat sho is de truth. De ones de white man know is nice colored folks. De ones he don't know is bad niggers.
Zora Neale Hurston
#14. The expectation of my life was that I might be able to work for some good white folks. Now I got some good white folks working for me.
Oprah Winfrey
#15. Jim he couldn't see no sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was white folks and knowed better than him;
Mark Twain
#16. We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got 'em, so they can keep 'em.
Miles Davis
#19. You white folks have long been eating the white meat of the chicken. We Negroes are now ready for some of the white meat instead of the dark meat.
Mary McLeod Bethune
#20. 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
#21. It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.
James McBride
#22. In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.
Benjamin E. Mays
#23. We white folks cling to such an abiding sense of entitlement that when things go amiss, we cannot let go of this tortuously sunny, idiotically cheerful doppelganger of a world that we deserve in which life is swell.
Lionel Shriver
#24. As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.
August Wilson
#25. 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
#26. White folks needs what black folks got just as much as black folks needs what white folks got, and we's all got to stay here mongst each other and git along, that's what.
Margaret Walker
#27. But in my life, the vast majority of people that have really afforded me the opportunity to succeed were white folks.
Tim Scott
#28. White folks hear the blues come out, but they don't know how it got there.
Ma Rainey
#29. They walked off down the hall in the direction of a sign that said Colored Waiting Room. Billie guessed white folks didn't have to wait.
Elaine Hussey
#30. I think that everyone thought that the Depression like everything else, was for the white-folks, so it had nothing to do with them.
Maya Angelou
#31. I'd heard of really bad things Klan folks did to Negroes. Mean, hateful, deadly things. I didn't know they were hateful toward white folks too.
Clare Vanderpool
#32. The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!
Gwendolyn Brooks
#33. These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored.
Langston Hughes
#34. There was a certain feeling I developed as a young person for black people. Somehow they were able to get pleasure out of things that I couldn't see them enjoying. I heard them sing a lot, and I didn't hear white folks going down the cotton rows singing that much.
Sam Phillips
#35. I didn't realize, when I decided to be a comic, that a black person had never been allowed to stand flat-footed in America and talk to white folks. It never happened before.
Dick Gregory
#36. I know my destiny. I was born into animosity, bigotry and hatred. We had water for white folks, and water for coloured folks. White lines, black lines. I came from Beaufort in South Carolina, and it was tougher than Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
Joe Frazier
#37. Hell no / I ain't going to go / Clean out my cell / And take my tail / To jail / Without bail / Because it's better there eating / Watching television fed / Than in Vietnam with your white folks dead.
Muhammad Ali
#38. That's exactly the good thing about the Injun life
you don't have to stop and think about whether or not you're 'happy'
which in my opinionis a highly overrated human condition invented by white folks
Jim Fergus
#39. Don't you know sugar is brown first? White folks couldn't stand the fact that something so sweet shared the same color as the people who cut the cane, slopped the hogs and picked the cotton. So they bleached it to resemble them, and now they done gone and fooled everybody. You included.
Bernice L. McFadden
#40. White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything - you know what I mean?
Miles Davis
#41. What happens to Black Folks today, happens to White Folks tomorrow.
Dick Gregory
#42. It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere ... That's the world! On which hope sits!
Barack Obama
#43. It is always open season on Christian and on white folks because they are the group you can kick and you can get away with it. It is politically correct.
Jack Kingston
#44. Forty years ago my mother died," he said. "She captured by Comanches, nine years old. Love Indian and wild life so well, no want to go back to white folks. All same people anyway, God say. I love my mother.
S.C. Gwynne
#45. White folks are not going to come to see a bunch of guys with tattoos, with cornrows. I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks different, they're stupid.
Charles Barkley
#46. They spend half they lives worrying about what white folks think.
Barack Obama
#47. 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
#48. For black folks, the Confederate flag represents the same thing that the Nazi flag represents to the Jews. There is absolutely no difference when we look at it. Now, white folks try to explain it away like, 'Oh, it's OK.' But when you're black, it is not OK. It represents oppression and murder.
Ken Page
#49. Dealing with race is about educating white folks.
Howard Dean
#50. 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
#51. Never let white folks know what you really think. If you're sad, laugh. If you're bleeding inside, dance.
Maya Angelou
#52. While it has become "cool" for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.
Bell Hooks
#53. The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.
Richard Wright
#54. It's like a fuckin' parade of white folks, one whiter than the next.
Simone Elkeles
#55. Listen, we've got one little ol' black president, and white folks are upset, but they've had 43.
Paul Mooney
#56. We Logans don't have much to do with white folks. You know why? 'Cause white folks mean trouble.
Mildred D. Taylor
#57. Now they're calling taking drugs an epidemic - that's cos white folks are doing it.
Richard Pryor
#58. White folks, no matter how well-meaning or open-minded, have no true idea what it's like to be black in America. That's not a slam against white people or an accusation of latent bigotry. But the fact is that we all live in an Anglo-dominated society.
John Ridley
#59. I thought, maybe the difference between white folks and colored is just this matter of reading and writing. I made up my mind I would know my letters.
Mary McLeod Bethune
#60. I'm with an old family was the euphemism used to dignify the professions of white folks' cooks and maids who talked so affectedly among their own kind in Roxbury [Massachusetts] that you couldn't even understand them.
Malcolm X
#61. I never thought I'd see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so, than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we was in Mississippi.
Dick Gregory
#62. She sat there in front of me and she didn't see me, she saw white folks.
Harper Lee
#63. My aunt says you should only pray to Jesus."
Blind Bill grunted and spat. "You think the white folks' god is gonna help you? You think he's on our side?"
"I don't think anybody's god is on our side.
Libba Bray
#64. White folks sure is a case!" She laid three slices of bread on top of the stove. "So spoiled with colored folks waiting on 'em all their days! Don't know what they'll do in heaven, 'cause I'm gonna sit down up there myself.
Langston Hughes
#65. White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was ... we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.
Al Sharpton
#66. In a broader sense, much of this story about the expansion of slavery and how it shaped the lives of black folks and the wider world is driven by the white men who tried to impose their codes on everything around them.
Edward E. Baptist
#67. Cry about the simple hell people give other people- without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people too.
Harper Lee
#68. Watching it all, I had a panic attack.
Holy shit! Most of the Thirld World sees America through the actions of backpackers. They're our diplomats in places like this. Our grungy kissingers. These folks must think we're all drawstring pant-wearing, Hacky-Sacking, white Rasta freaks. We're doomed.
Franz Wisner
#69. What happens is sometimes these congregations will still have the white style of worship, even though they're mixed, because folks are willing to give up whatever they may have come with. So it's still quite a stretch for African Americans, yeah.
Michael Emerson
#70. Us colored folks is too envious of one 'nother. Dat's how come us don't git no further than us do. Us talks about de white man keepin' us down! Shucks! He don't have tuh. Us keeps our own selves down.
Zora Neale Hurston
#71. Old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.
Tim Wise
#72. Cry about what, Mr. Raymond?" Dill's maleness was beginning to assert itself. "Cry about the simple hell people give other people - without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people, too." "Atticus
Harper Lee
#73. I used to believe in em (lines). I don't anymore. They in our heads. Lines between black and white ain't there neither. Some folks just made those up, long time ago. And that go for the white trash and the so-ciety ladies too.
Kathryn Stockett
#74. The secret of a successful art career is to make more art that folks think they need than pieces they just want. When a piece of art emotionally connects with a person the work becomes a need. You are then on your way to becoming successful.
Jack White
#75. In life, you learned that not all white people are racist, not all black folks are criminals, let's admit it and love one another..
Werley Nortreus
#76. I come to the understanding that maybe what was on the inside was more important, and that your outer covering didn't count so much as folks thought it did, colored or white, man or woman.
James McBride
#77. I was conscious of the fact that it could be to my disadvantage to marry a white guy - that some folks would hold that against me.
Susan Rice
#78. College students, couples, people covered with eagle tattoos, boat captains, white-haired folks - we were all singing, waiting especially for the chorus
Peter Jenkins
#79. The TV shouted an old black-and-white film he didn't recognize, wheelchairs facing it like church pews.
Sere Prince Halverson
#80. I looked it at like this way. To get folks to like you, as a screen player I mean, I figured you had to sort of be their ideal. I don't mean a handsome knight riding a white horse, but a fella who answered the description of a right guy.
Gary Cooper
#81. You know what the problem that animal activists sometimes have? They only concentrate on the heartbreaking things to the point where the general public thinks, 'Oh, here comes those animal folks again and I'm going to hear all the things I don't want to hear.'
Betty White
#82. He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad.
William Faulkner
#83. White people made up the n-word, they knew about racial jokes before anybody, and in their old movies and old cartoons they made fun of everybody, especially black folks. Racial jokes were not new to them.
Paul Mooney
#84. That's something a lot of folks don't know about me - I'm pretty darn funny.
Michael Jai White
#85. Folks who make such a fuss about their rights turn them into wrongs sometimes.
(from Behind the White Brick)
Frances Hodgson Burnett
#86. America's put American Black Folks in such a bad position, empty plates and glasses now get us full.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#87. The system of white supremacy is intended to make folks of color doubt themselves, their intelligence, their abilities, their very sanity. And so it's important to remember that folks of color know their own realities.
Tim Wise
#88. Why are black folks singing Amazing Grace which is a song about a white slaver's conversion?
Dick Gregory
#89. As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H.L. Mencken
#90. The old folks say there is only black and white. That may do for their tidy lives, but it doesn't apply to all of us. We, Supergirls for real and the wretched creature at my feet, live in the gray and the mist. We may never see the stars, but we believe in the dream of them.
Mav Skye
#91. All these faces look happy enough, say Shug. Big and beefy. Eyes clear and innocent, like they don't know them other crooks on the front page. But they the same folks, she say.
Alice Walker
#92. Creation is filled with soul-sick folks, colored and white, never knowing where they belong. They tangle everybody else up in their grief.
Jonathan Odell
#93. In the end, he said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless, he wondered why the white people were not better than they are, having had it for so long. He promised that just as soon as white people achieved Christianity, he would recommend it to his own folks.
Charles Frazier
#94. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#95. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I'll share the formula I learned while forging my way forward as a full-time painter for forty-four years. The steps all break down to one simple sentence: Make art that connects with enough folks for you to earn a splendid living.
Jack White
#96. There are black men who are madly in love with white women. God bless them, if that's what works for them. I just hope that we can strike a balance that portrays black folks and the black family in a light that's not extreme. Those are the types of characters that I find myself attracted to.
Nia Long
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