Quotes About Racism

He had spent three hardscrabble years performing on the Chitlin' Circuit—a route of juke joints, icehouses, and barrooms where rhythm-and-blues music was played primarily to African American audiences. Just to get to those gigs, traveling black musicians had to plan carefully in advance such things as finding food and using a toilet, simple services that were denied blacks in parts of white America.

I, for one, would think both about how far we have come as a country and how much further we need to go to erase racism and discrimination from our society.

This is it. The root of it all. The real history of yellow people in America. Two hundred years of being perpetual foreigners.

To be yellow in America...a special guest star, forever the guest. Fade to black.

The idea of just adding women to things as they are is not nearly as likely to excite people as the idea that society as a whole could be different. To believe that the degradation of sexism and racism, the violence in our lives that we have today is not inevitable moves people to action.

Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men — how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?

I don't think I've ever met any Mexicans before." "They're tyrants, and imperialists, every last one of them." If he'd been holding any more tobacco in his lip, he no doubt would've used it to chase the sentence out of his mouth. "And I guess you've talked to every last one of them, to be so sure of that.

Say that to my mother. She stays up at night wondering about who will marry me with this skin colour.

When the Negro was completely an underdog, he needed white spokesmen. Liberals played their parts in this period exceedingly well. In assault after assault, they led the intellectual revolt against racism, and took the initiative in founding the civil rights organizations. But now that the Negro has rejected his role as the underdog, he has become more assertive in his search for identity and group solidarity; he wants to speak for himself.

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism.

These crimes were all motivated by economic jealousy. Either the Negroes in the area were more prosperous than the Whites, or the black workers would not let themselves be exploited thoroughly. In all cases, the principal culprits were never troubled, for the simple reason that they were always incited, encouraged, spurred on, then protected, by the politicians, financiers, and authorities, and above all, by the reactionary press.

Among the collection of crimes of American "civilization," lynching has a special place of honor.

Imagine a furious horde….This horde is transported with the wild delight of a crime to be committed without risk. They are armed with sticks, torches, revolvers, ropes, knives, scissors, vitriol, daggers; in a word, with all that can be used to wound or kill. Imagine in this, a flotsam of black flesh pushed about, beaten, trampled underfoot, torn, slashed, insulted, tossed hither and thither, bloodstained, dead. The horde are the lynchers. The human rag is the Black, the victim.

Racism consists in devaluing the humanity of certain people by dismissing it or playing it down (even when not intentional) at the same time as highlighting and playing up European philosophy, assuming it to be universal. It may be global, because it piggybacks on imperial expansion, but it certainly cannot be universal.

Yet Wallace and other segregationists created an inflamed environment in which a confused but also ambitious man like Ray could think it was permissible, perhaps even noble, to murder King. The signals Ray was picking up enabled him to believe that society would smile on his crime. What

The new policy was tantamount to apartheid, to be sure. But if it was predicated on the prevailing racism of the time, it was also fueled by an emerging humanitarian concern that whole tribes were truly on the brink of expiration—becoming, in Carleton's alarming phrase, Children of the Mist.

I was being thrown to the wolves. Even though I did something great, nobody wanted to be a part of it. I was so isolated. I couldn't share it. For many years, even after Jackie Robinson, baseball was so segregated, really. You just didn't expect us to have a chance to do anything. Baseball was meant for the lily-white.

The only thing I can say is that I had a rough time with it. I don't talk about it much. It still hurts a little bit inside, because I think it has chipped away at a part of my life that I will never have again. I didn't enjoy myself. It was hard for me to enjoy something that I think I worked very hard for. God had given me the ability to play baseball, and people in this country kind of chipped away at me. So, it was tough. And all of those things happened simply because I was a black person.

There wasn't much white people would allow us to do in those days. You could be a schoolteacher or an athlete to get away from the manual labor and servant-type jobs, but there wasn't much else they were going to allow you [to] do.

Some people resented the fact I was trying to break a white man's record. For a year and a half, I had to stay in another hotel (away from the team) and ate at the hotel in my room.... There were people who wanted to do me harm.

Then, as now, white America was largely indifferent to even the most shocking crimes, as long as they were restricted to the black community.

I actually took them all on quite handily, although I learned when I came to study the issue that I was completely wrong. I also came to believe that the war on drugs is one of the last vestiges of institutionalized racism in our society.

Fear of black rebellion among planters was deep and long-standing. 7 It began in the first years that African slaves were brought ashore, but in 1739, an incident of unprecedented ferocity caught every slaveowner in its grip.

Clay broke out in a big grin, and I realized he'd make a terrific black Santa Claus and, with the political correctness and diversity thing being trendy at the time, I thought it might even be a money-making idea for him. But I kept the idea to myself, not sure if it'd be taken as some kind of racist jab. You can't be too sure these days.