White Person Sayings

#1. Every white person in this country-and I do not care what he or she says-knows one thing. They may not know, as they put, "what I want",but they know they would not like to be black here.
If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.

James Baldwin

#2. White performances were always dull in comparison to the astonishing expressiveness of Black dancers. Behind the white person's inarticulate body were centuries of condemnation of dancing on religious grounds.

Jamake Highwater

#3. A white person was by definition somebody. Other people needed, across their hearts, one steel rib.

Gish Jen

#4. The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come.

Amar Bose

#5. Let me just say this right now, in case there's any confusion in 2016: If you're a white person and you have references on standby to verify that you're allowed to say the N-word, you are probably the last person on planet Earth who should be saying nigga.

Phoebe Robinson

#6. I don't know if this is statistically right, but I'm assuming I have the most Grammys of anyone my age, but I haven't won one against a white person.

Kanye West

#7. I don't have to really be in the 60s. Every time I hail a cab in New York, and they pass me by and pick up the white person, then I get a dose of it. Or when they don't want to take you to Harlem. I grew up with that.

Queen Latifah

#8. I wondered if a white person could ever comment on the minority experience and get it right.

Catherine Ryan Hyde

#9. If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.

Bill Ayers

#10. [My grandmother] is a typical white person.

Barack Obama

#11. it is when a white person resists the privilege of turning colorless that he frees himself, at least partially from the sickness of racialism.

Russell Banks

#12. Anyone who watches a lot of television, or listens to pop music, is familiar with a certain vision of America. If not exactly colorblind, this America is one in which different races easily interact, in which a white person might have an Asian boss, Hispanic stepson, or African-American frenemy.

Wesley Morris

#13. I obviously had my reggae, but I got quite into rockabilly when I was a kid, because I was trying to find something that represented me as a white person.

Paul Simonon

#14. 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

#15. There are two worlds out there - two Americas out there. If you're a white person, there's one way of being a citizen in our country, and if you're a brown or a black body, there's another way of being a citizen, and that way is very close to death. It's very close to the loss of your life.

Claudia Rankine

#16. I think that, as a white person stepping into doing any sort of anti-systematic-racism type of work, asking yourself, 'What is your intention?' needs to happen on a consistent basis. Check yourself. Check yourself. Check yourself, like, constantly.

Macklemore

#17. I started to understand what the song could be about. The ache of nostalgia even for things we don't like, the commitment to keep moving despite that ache. It made me think of how I relate to my privilege - as a white person, as someone who grew up upper middle class.

Erin McKeown

#18. There's nothing wrong with being a cop. There's nothing wrong with being a white person. It's about where your heart is ... We've got to get everyone beyond the xenophobic isolationism.

Bobby Seale

#19. I think if you are a black person or an Hispanic person, you are not as fond of Rudolph Giuliani as you are if you happen to be a white person. Because he has trampled on people's civil rights.

Lynn Samuels

#20. It's easier, as a white person, to be silent about racial injustice. It's easier. On paper. But it's not easier on the whole, because injustice affects all of us, whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Macklemore

#21. I think everybody has the ability to fall in love with a man or with a woman or a white person or a black person or a Jewish person or a Protestant person or whatever.

Ally Sheedy

#22. I want to go up to the closest white person and say: 'You can't understand this, it's a black thing' and then slap him, just for my mental health.

Charles Barron

#23. There are a lot of young black girls who I meet in my travels who don't have a lot of self-esteem. So if I communicate to them that they're beautiful, no white person should find fault in that. It doesn't mean that young white girls aren't beautiful, because they are just as beautiful.

Lauryn Hill

#24. If you're a white person in the wrong neighborhood, you're an underdog.

Robin Thede

#25. I've done some really weird gigs. The ones where no one turned up - they're probably not the interesting ones to talk about. I played some pretty random ones in L.A. I signed to play all-R&B nights or an all-comedy night where I'd be the only white person there. They were fun.

Ed Sheeran

#26. It's always weird being the only white person in a group. It feels like everyone's looking to me for guidance.

Zach Braff

#27. But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.

Audre Lorde

#28. I think segregation is bad, I think it's wrong, it's immoral. I'd fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don't need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.

Clarence Thomas

#29. Once in a while, God sends a good white person my way, even to this day. I think it's God's way of keeping me from becoming too mean. And when he sends a nice one to me, then I have to eat crow. And honey, crow is a tough old bird to eat, let me tell you.

Annie Elizabeth Delany

#30. Writing kept her sane. Kept her form spinning out of control. Kept her tongue still whenever some white person spoke down to her. She had to write, it was the only thing that was completely hers, that she could look forward to at the end of her long day.

Bernice L. McFadden

#31. All the networks have always been willing to have ethnic people as the third or fourth lead or the best friend to the white person. But to actually let a black family or an Asian family carry a show, that's something where there hasn't really been a precedent set in terms of a real financial gain.

Constance Wu

#32. Mike Bloomfield sat down and started playing, and I went, whoa! Because I had never heard any white person play like that before. And he was about my age, and he just, that finished off my guitar career, just like that, in one afternoon.

Al Kooper

#33. The same way that racism is a white person's problem, violence against women is a men's problem.

Gloria Steinem

#34. I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

Gordon Parks

#35. I never wanted to give up. I thought I might have to. Especially at the beginning when chimpanzees had never seen a white person before.They gave one look at me and ran away! They were scared, but eventually I got their trust.

Jane Goodall

#36. I'm from the South, where if you walk down the street and there's somebody behind you talking with a Southern accent, you can't tell whether it's a black or a white person.

Johnnie Cochran

#37. The vast majority of murdered whites are murdered by other whites. That's why there's no national outrage when a white person is killed by a black person: it's not evidence of some underlying black violence problem directed against white people.

Ben Shapiro

#38. I hate it when, after I let a white person know they've said something racist, I end up having to listen for hours to their life.

Toi Derricotte

#39. Never trust a white person black people don't like.

John Grisham

#40. If you are able to introduce a white person to a new cheese, it's like introducing them to a future spouse.

Christian Lander

#41. Why is it that it's okay to call a white person "mate" yet it's not okay to call a black guy "primate"?

Frankie Boyle

#42. White people are drawn to farmer's markets like moths to a flame. In fact, white people have such strong instincts that if
you release a white person into a random Saturday morning they will return to you with a reusable bag full of fruits and vegetables.

Christian Lander

#43. We were not talking about the average white person: we was talking about the corporate money rich and the racist jive politicians and the lackeys, as we used to call them, for the government who perpetuate all this exploitation and racism.

Bobby Seale

#44. As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility - which I do.

Majora Carter

#45. If you're African American, you are forced into making different choices, in a lot of cases, than you are as a white person.

Daryl Hall

#46. 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

#47. I had felt for a long time that, if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.

Rosa Parks

#48. I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver. I'm asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#49. In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious ... The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person's skin had burned off.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#50. Find a balance between one's responsibility as a white person to confront acts of racism and one's subconscious sense of power and privilege over people of color when reacting to the [racist] event.

Eileen O'Brien

#51. Now Dave Eggers, if you lived in San Francisco, is not an easy person to be done with. Everyone - and by everyone, I mean every white person with a college education and an interest in books - wants a piece of him. It's not just his amazingly powerful prose; it's also his charitable works.

James Bernard Frost

#52. He [liberal white person] may stand with you through thin, but not thick; when the chips are down, you'll find that as fixed in him as his bone structure is his sometimes subconscious conviction that he's better than anybody black.

Malcolm X

#53. I have never been what you would call just an integrationist. I know I've been called that ... Integrating that bus wouldn't mean more equality. Even when there was segregation, there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us.

Rosa Parks

#54. I would never let a white boy beat me. You can print that. I would never lose to a white person.

Bernard Hopkins

#55. It is the dream of every white person to be able to resolve all conflicts by complaining to unrelated parties. Because of this, white people are able to endure years of frustration and anger without saying a word in the hopes that everything will just work itself out without having to make a scene.

Christian Lander

#56. If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past do it willingly.

Mamie Till

#57. The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person ...

Barack Obama

#58. There was a time in American history when almost every white person knew who Aretha Franklin was.

Peabo Bryson

#59. In the '80s and '90s, I was really interested in, moved by, exhilarated by, and troubled by rap in all the ways a white person from Brookline, Massachusetts should be. That was music that was making trouble, and it was interesting and provocative trouble.

John Hodgman

#60. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

Peggy McIntosh

#61. No one tells every white person in this country how to be. No one tells every Hispanic, or Asian or Jewish person in this country how to be. There is no single definition of whiteness or single definition of blackness.

Montel Williams

#62. I'm sure no intelligent white person in his or her right white mind, want black men and women marrying their white sons and daughters and in return introducing their grandchildren to half brown, kinky haired black people.

Muhammad Ali

#63. Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.

Bill Cosby

#64. I never met a white person till I was a grown man. I never went to school with a white till I was twenty-six years old, at Harvard Law School. The insult of segregation was searing and unforgettable. It has left a great scar, and will be with me for the rest of my life.

Randall Robinson

#65. So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?

Sister Souljah

#66. It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism.

Malcolm X

#67. All white people in the United States have benefited from a white supremacy. But does that mean that a white person should be viewed badly because they turn against a white supremacist policy? Just because you've benefited from something shouldn't disable you from repudiating it.

Randall Kennedy

#68. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal one dead white person.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#69. I know a lot about being white - because I have to, I live in the white world. A white person doesn't live in the Indian world. I have to be white every day.

Sherman Alexie

#70. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn't matter when you're alone together because it's just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#71. If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race.

Jamaica Kincaid

#72. I'm really just a normal person.

Vanna White

#73. Country music is the combination of African and European folk songs coming together and doing a little waltz right here in the American south. They came together at some cotillion, and somebody snuck a black person into the room, and he danced with a white lady, and music was born.

Ketch Secor

#74. [...] here "white" could be the way a person talked; "black," the music a person listened to. In Ghana you could only be what you were, what your skin announced to the world.

Yaa Gyasi

#75. 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

#76. If you're a beach person or a golfer, Key West is not for you. Most of the sand has been imported, and the water is shallow until you've waded far out, and all the way the sea floor is covered with yucky algae and sea grass.

Edmund White

#77. People think I'm Snow White ... the most boring person in the world!

Andrea McLean

#78. It's just cheaper to be White in America than it is to be Black, because of educational advances, because of the police incidents, because of the poverty we grow up in as African-Americans. So, it's just cheaper in this country if you're born a Caucasian than being born a Black person.

Warren Ballentine

#79. Fern was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice. As a result, she now has a pig. A small one to be sure, but nevertheless a pig. It just shows what can happen if a person gets out of bed promptly.

E.B. White

#80. Because for me it is almost analgesic to talk about what the white man is doing against us. And it keeps a person frozen in their seat, it keeps you frozen in your hole you're sitting in.

Bill Cosby

#81. Maybe there is something when it all ends. Maybe there is memory, memory of the person you loved, when you lived. Maybe this is the white-light-tunnel deal, and I'm pressing toward it, and it's pressing back, until we become the same thing.

Kate Ellison

#82. You know how a person is made for something? Eminem is made for hip-hop. The best rapper is a white man.

Curtis Jackson

#83. The day stared back an empty gray, with not a speck of white to give character to the lifeless sky.

Ashley Madau

#84. So not every person fits into the little rooms we build to hold them. There are infinite combinations of human and inhuman, male and female, brown and white.

Lila Bowen

#85. I was in a Montessori school. There was a drum circle with all the kids passing around a little bongo drum. I was the last person in the circle, and when it got to me I played 'Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits' - in front of all the parents. Blew the crowd away at five years old.

Jack White

#86. I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash.

Phil Robertson

#87. Touring a segregated America - forever being stopped and harassed by white cops hurt you most 'cos you don't realise the damage. You hold it in. You feel empty, like someone reached in and pulled out your guts. You feel hurt and dirty, less than a person.

B.B. King

#88. I'm a very self-conscious person; I think we all are, but I'm especially not very comfortable in my body. I always feel really weird and awkward on the street or on the stage. It has nothing to do with circumstances; it's just an ongoing psychological state, like white noise.

Sufjan Stevens

#89. The wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man (or any person) on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he is worthy to have.

Theodore Roosevelt

#90. I love white shirts because they feel like a security blanket. You can wear them with anything. It's the person and the way that they wear it that makes it different. I have been designing white shirts forever, but I don't get tired of it.

Carolina Herrera

#91. A liberal is a person who believes that water can be made to run uphill. A conservative is someone who believes everybody should pay for his water. I'm somewhere in between: I believe water should be free, but that water flows downhill.

Theodore White

#92. I never refused my help to any person black or white; and I liked the office nonetheless because there were neither fees nor salary connected with it.

Salmon P. Chase

#93. No one had ever left me so simultaneously relaxed and knotted up all at once (except maybe Rhett Butler, which doesn't count since he's not a real person).

Cecily White

#94. I have always had the deepest respect for Bill Nicholson as a person and as a manager. The Spurs boss is an honest Yorkshireman and you will go a long way before finding a straighter character than that. Bill has never wavered in his determination to give White Hart Lane fans the best.

Bill Shankly

#95. When I started as a White House correspondent, there was a lot of criticism from guys saying, 'She focuses too much on the person but not enough on policy.' I never understood that argument at all. I just didn't agree with the premise.

Maureen Dowd

#96. When I do an action thing, it speaks louder than the things that I've done that are dramatic and comedy. Actually, if you look at my resume, I have just as much comedic things as dramas, and I have far less action things than all of the other things, but I'm kind of defined as an action person.

Michael Jai White

#97. I cannot see myself in a new car. I am a tiny white van person. That is what i want!

Alexander McCall Smith

#98. When a black person has no electricity, no water, they call it the ghetto. When white people have no electricity and no water, they call it camping.

Carlos Mencia

#99. Life wanted faces that would express what we wanted to tell. Not just the unusual or striking face, but the face that would speak out the message from the printed page. I am always looking for some typical person or face that will tie the picture essay together in a human way.

Margaret Bourke-White

#100. But at the time I didn't know that it would take more to escape black-and-white thinking than just no longer attending your parents' church. The church had provided me a sorting system, which was now ingrained. It had containers into which every person and idea and event was to be placed.

Nadia Bolz-Weber