Quotes About Racism

In my school, racism was ubiquitous and unrelenting, and not just from the pupils. For a year I was terrorised by one of my teachers.

I have often said I come from a family of unreliable narrators. I tend to believe their struggles with racism, identity, nationality do dovetail with my motivation to write.

As a Black man, you are living in a place and you are constantly unsafe. And we go to these bastions of safety: Harlem, you can call that a haven; the South Side of Chicago, you can call that haven; Detroit, you can call that haven.

My mother had two unshakable beliefs that she tried to drill into me. The first was that I had to study and work twice as hard as my white peers if I wanted to survive in America, and the second was that it was delusional and dangerous to believe I possessed the same freedom white people had to pursue my dreams.

Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.

The military is a microcosm of American society, so it really is not unusual that they would have Klan people and white supremacy people connected to them.

When I was a child, growing up on a council estate in the northeast of England, I imbibed enough of the background racial tensions of the late 1970s and 1980s to feel profoundly unwelcome in Britain.

There's racism everywhere in the world; it's not just Sweden, it's everywhere, but other than that I had a pretty okay upbringing.

In many ways, everything about my upbringing decreed that I wouldn't write a memoir because in the world where I grew up, in Chicago in the Fifties and Sixties, one key way of protesting ourselves - 'we' meaning black people - against racism, against its stereotypes and its insults, was to curate and narrate very carefully the story of the people.

I grew up thinking I was inferior to white-skinned people. And as a child if you are conditioned like this, it becomes a part of your upbringing that you believe that probably because I look like this, I won't get anywhere in life.

The Trump administration has done everything in its power to uphold the harsh racist reality we have faced.

I believe in the law. I think we have a great system of justice. But I do think that system of justice has been corrupted by racism and classism. I think it's difficult for 'poor people' - poor white people, brown people - to be treated fairly before the law in the same way that upper-class people are.

Why is racism still a conversation in 2020? We are all one. It hurts me. It upsets me.

One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to now there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghetto.

There's so much material out there that's unnecessarily racist. It takes a shot at what is 'urban' or demonstrates blackness with some sassy, neck-jiving character that's not even relevant to the plot. I see it time and time again, and it doesn't move the story forward. It just kind of cryogenically freezes us in this old racial paradigm.

Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses...

When we're unemployed, we're called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it's called a depression.

I would hope that racism is something that just does not work in this day and age, but I know otherwise.

Mainstream Canadians, what some might call the dominant culture, like to think this racism doesn't happen. It's important to remind people that it does and that we have work to do to end it.

How can you work in film and still see the overt racism that exists in film and not just be furious all the time?

I think the traditional stereotypes are loaded in institutional racism.

When I first was exposed to 'Porgy and Bess' many, many years ago, I was blown away by it - loved the music, overwhelmed by the production at the Met that I saw, and thought I want to play Bess someday. But I also knew they were stereotypes that were considered racist.

You are, in fact, stigmatized as a racist, because, after all, you have know acknowledged that your nation practiced racism explicitly for four centuries. And, now, since the '60s, white Americans have been grappling with the stigma, trying prove that they are not racist, to prove the negative.

Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.