Quotes About Racial

ALTHOUGH THE WATTS RIOT of 1965 was an extreme response, it appears in retrospect as an ominous omen of the future. One domestic crisis after another in the next few years, including even bloodier racial confrontations in the cities, shattered the optimism of social engineers and threw liberals back on the defensive. By late 1965 Johnson himself seemed close to despair.

The depopulation of rural America at the time, accelerated by the technological revolution that was rendering farm labor superfluous, was one of the most harrowing and large-scale demographic developments of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Because relatively few American officials attended to the problems of these people in the 1950s, the mass migrations set the stage for social and racial dynamite that exploded in the cities after 1965.73

THESE MANIFESTATIONS OF BACKLASH—against family breakup, illegitimacy, welfare, crime, riots, black activists, anti-war demonstrators, long-haired hippies, government programs that favored minorities, elitists, liberals generally—exposed a major development of the mid-1960s: rapidly rising polarization along class, generational, and racial lines.

Not unlike our country's history, my personal history was founded upon an unfortunate history of racial conflict between black and white.

The evidence of our divided racial self was all over the Obama presidency from the beginning: from the shouts of 'you lie' from the well of Congress as he spoke to a joint session, to the unprecedented spectacle of American conservatives rooting against their own country being awarded the Olympic Games.

Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.

The history of racial violence in our country is both omnipresent and unspoken. It is a smog that surrounds us that few will admit is there.

Yes, President Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, but a hundred years later, the Republican Party wasn't Lincoln's. Richard Nixon became president by courting Americans upset by integration, intentionally fueling the racial divide.

The Army confronted racial integration when it was still unpopular in society. It has been struggling to more fully integrate women. Its troops, after all, reflect society.

Free press is not absolute. In this country, we say clearly if you start stirring up racial hatred, then we will put a stop to it. We might even close down your paper, because these things can only lead to a lot of riots and bloodshed.

My father is from Mississippi, and I heard stories of racial injustice my whole life.

This formal system of racial preference was codified from the 1600s until at least the mid-to-late '60s, when the nation passed civil rights legislation, at least theoretically establishing equality in employment, voting, and housing opportunity.

Since homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a "worldview" that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the final analysis, "faith" in its own mindless mission.

A planetary vision of bloody racial struggle, something not inherently attractive to most people most of the time, was translated at moments of stress into concepts and images that could generate political support.

There has been some snobbishness, particularly among the much older generation. There's class and then there's the racial thing.

At various times in the past, technological optimists have predicted that textile workers would benefit from factory automation, that women would be emancipated by washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and that racial discrimination would vanish in the age of computers. If only.

It would be difficult, in this day and age, to fund art that made racial slurs.

All strong characters and peoples are race conscious and are instinctively averse to marriage outside their own racial group.

The book which most profoundly influenced that mind, which sent Wilhelm II into ecstasies and provided the Nazis with their racial aberrations, was Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts) a work of some twelve hundred pages which Chamberlain, again possessed of one of his "demons," wrote in nineteen months between April 1, 1897, and October 31, 1898, in Vienna, and which was published in 1899.

It took this tragic moment in America's racial history to forge the bond that Robert Kennedy had been seeking. The recognition of shared victimhood played a part. His reference to a "member of my family" was the sole public mention he was ever to make regarding his own relationship to what he would call "the events of November 1963.

The diet industry is built upon an ideology of racial, as well as gender, prejudice.20

I had also learned that the death penalty in the United States has always been most rigorously applied in Southern states - mostly toward those who kill whites.

these instances bore none of the harrowing features of racially motivated torture, mutilation, and cruelty endemic to Euro-American lynching of African Americans. In Germany, the ritual did not culminate as it did in roughly five thousand cases in the United States between the end of the American Civil War and 1968—in actual human sacrifice.

I think if we're going to be serious as a city, as a country, about addressing climate change, addressing inequality and racial disparities, we have to start taking action at the scale that matches the urgency of the problems.