Quotes About Racism

Racism is a prejudice erected into a system.

I was ten when Mike Smiley, half-Indian, skinny, brown-skinned, brought the word jigaboo to school like lunch, or the flu, fed him by his adopted white father who said that's what we called them then. By noon it was done--everyone had a name for what had been bothering them, some thing utterly human as hate.

Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.

What the paper failed to recognize was that black people's willingness to work had never been the problem. Having to work for free, under backbreaking conditions and the threat of the lash, was the real issue.

The Supreme Court thus identified states as the ultimate defenders of rights, although Southern states had repeatedly proven themselves the ultimate violators of those rights.

Jim Crow dominated the lives of black people in America from 1890 well into the twentieth century. From conception to coffin, there was no nook or cranny of a black person's life that it did not touch.

The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional, and pervasive.

According to Human Rights Watch, "the proportion of blacks in prison populations exceeds the proportion among state residents in every single state.

The whittling down of racism to sheet-wearing goons allowed a cloud of racial innocence to cover many whites who, although "resentful of black progress" and determined to ensure that racial inequality remained untouched, could see and project themselves as the "kind of upstanding white citizen[s]" who were "positively outraged at the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan.

White rage doesn't have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.

In what can only be described as a travelogue of death, as he went from county to county, state to state, he conveyed the sickening unbearable stench of decomposing black bodies hanging from limbs, rotting in ditches, and clogging the roadways.46 White Southerners, it was obvious, had unleashed a reign of terror and anti-black violence that had reached "staggering proportions." Many urged the president to strengthen the federal presence in the South.47 Johnson refused,

Equally vicious was the practice of "whitecapping," which, since the horrors of Bosnia and Srebrenica, we now recognize as ethnic cleansing: In several Georgia and Mississippi counties, where plantations did not dominate the economy, local whites maimed, murdered, and terrorized African Americans and, as the persecuted fled, seized all the land until one could "ride for miles and not see a black face.

Sweet had also been in Washington, D.C., during the Red Summer 1919, when police allowed whites to rampage for days slaughtering black people. The tide turned only after returning African American veterans had seen enough, polished their rifles, and began shooting.93

Even as late as 1960, more than 98 percent of Mississippi's black adults were not registered to vote.49

Similarly, the amendments covering the criminal justice system—the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth—have offered little to no protection for African Americans because of numerous Supreme Court decisions that have embedded racism and racial profiling into policing, trial procedures, and sentencing.

Yet as myopic and convoluted as the rulings have been, there is a clear human rights pathway on this: The court simply has to acknowledge how profoundly embedded racism is in the criminal justice system—from racial profiling to police stops, to access to competent counsel, to jury selection, to the impact of the victim's race on the trial, to sentencing—and declare the death penalty unconstitutional.

The wholesale slaughter of African Americans in Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), and Ocoee, Florida (1920), resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives simply because whites were enraged that black people had voted.

It denied the enslaved the right to bear arms; ignored the right to self-defense for Black people; and put in place a "large-scale military machinery," the militia, "to crack down [on] any conspiracies or uprisings." 15 As early as 1639, Virginia prohibited Africans from carrying guns because "what white Southerners feared the most … [was] an armed black man unafraid to retaliate against both the system of slavery and those who fought to defend it.

The states couldn't possibly build two comparable systems. But if they really wanted Jim Crow, the NAACP began to make painfully clear, they would have to pay for it.5

In 1680, as racialized chattel slavery congealed, the legislature crafted a law denying the enslaved and free Blacks the right to self-defense if attacked by their " 'master' and/ or Whites." 18 Next, in 1723, the colony's statute explicitly stated that "no negro, mulatto, or indian [sic] whatsoever" should have a gun "under penalty of a whipping not to exceed twenty-nine lashes.

Indeed, by 1963, not one black child attended a public school with a white child in South Carolina, Alabama, or Mississippi.

Senator Walter George (D-GA) was proud of how states like his beloved Georgia were able to legally disfranchise millions of voters. "Why apologize or evade?" he asked. "We have been very careful to obey the letter of the Federal Constitution—but we have been very diligent in violating the spirit of such amendments and such statutes as would have a Negro to believe himself the equal of a white man."117

Millions of enslaved people and their ancestors had built the enormous wealth of the United States; indeed, in 1860, 80 percent of the nation's gross national product was tied to slavery.19 Yet, in return for nearly 250 years of toil, African Americans had received nothing but rape, whippings, murder, the dismemberment of families, and forced subjugation, illiteracy, and abject poverty. The quest to break the chains was clear.

The whole culture of the white South was erected on the presumption of black inability.