Quotes About Racism

I sound like a racist, a benighted man or a xenophobe, but I'm motivated by love for my country and the knowledge that I don't have another country.

In point of fact, the racism on the campuses is greater than that in the larger society in many campuses. And what I worry about is that they're going to graduate into the general society, blacks and whites alike, who hate each other's guts and who will be the new leaders of new racial strife for the future. (ca.1990)

There are some overtly racist and sexist people out there—look around—but in general what we count and what we fail to count is often the result of an unexamined choice, of subtle biases and hidden assumptions that we haven't realized are leading us astray.

Hardly any aspect of my life, from where I had lived to my education to my employment history to my friendships, had been free from the taint of racial inequity, from racism, from whiteness. My racial identity had shaped me from the womb forward. I had not been in control of my own narrative. It wasn't just race that was a social construct. So was I.

Almost all of those big government programs I just mentioned, which retained such high levels of support from the white masses, had been racially exclusive in design and implementation. In fact, the only way President Roosevelt could get most of the New Deal passed was by capitulating to the racist whims of white Southern senators who insisted that blacks be excluded from most of its benefits.

Frederick Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News, predicted, "If a decision is made to send Negroes to school with white children, there will be bloodshed. The stains of that bloodshed will be on the Supreme Court steps."68

Lord you gave your only son to remedy a condition, but who knows but what the death of my only son might bring an end to lynching.

What the migrants learned by word of mouth has since been established as fact. Mississippi outstripped the rest of the nation in virtually every measure of lynching: the greatest number of lynchings, the most lynchings per capita, the most lynchings without an arrest or conviction, the most female victims, the most multiple lynchings, and on and on.

the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend.

Milam and Bryant were not on a political mission when they pounded on Moses Wright's door, and they did not kidnap Emmett Till beneath the banner of states' rights, racial integrity, or white supremacy. The white men carried out their brutal errand in an atmosphere created by the Citizens' Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and the mass of white public opinion, all of which demanded that African Americans remain the subservient mudsill of Mississippi—or die.

According to William Bradford Huie, Milam later justified Till's lynching using the terms of violent racial and sexual politics: Just as long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are going to stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government

The murder of Emmett Till was reported in one of the very first banner headlines of the civil rights era and launched the national coalition that fueled the modern civil rights movement.

People everywhere are joining to fight because of the way Emmett Till died—but also because of the way he was forced to live.

And it is no surprise that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant would assume they could murder Emmett Till without

Jimmie Davis beat the certifiably insane incumbent Earl K. Long, had been all about keeping blacks out of the schools. On inauguration day, Davis (composer of the song "You Are My Sunshine") rode his horse right into the legislature

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

There is no such things as race," said Morrison. Racism is a construct; a social construct. And it has benefits. Money can be made off of it. People who don't like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So [racism] has a social function. But race can only be defined as a human being

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.

It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.

They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time.

We can be clear. We can identify the enemy. We can begin by asking ourselves what it is right rather than what is expedient. Know the difference between fever and the disease. Between racism and greed. We can be clear and we can be careful. Careful to avoid the imprisonment of the mind, the spirit, and the will of ourselves and those among whom we live. We can be careful of tolerating second-rate goals and secondhand ideas.

schoolteacher didn't take advice from Negroes. The information they offered he called backtalk and developed a variety of corrections (which he recorded in his notebook) to reeducate them.