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Quotes About Racism

Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.
~ Audre Lorde
This war has made racists of too many of the and too many of us, and it is the leadership in Khartoum that has stoked this fire, that has brought to the surface, and in some cases created from whole cloth, new hatreds that have bred unprecedented acts of brutality.
~ Dave Eggers
other nations throughout Europe have built their own territory markers, including Spain, Greece, Norway, Hungary, Macedonia, and Austria. Are these countries racist? Are they building walls in the name of racism? Of course not.
~ Dave Rubin
Poverty in black families headed by single women is thirty-seven percent. The undeniable truth is that neither slavery nor Jim Crow nor the harshest racism has decimated the black family the way the welfare state has. The black family structure is not the only retrogression suffered by blacks in the age of racial enlightenment.
~ Dave Rubin
progressives see racism, sexism, and discrimination everywhere, except where it actually exists.
~ Dave Rubin
the fate of Bobby Weed at the hands of white Southern Americans is as bottomlessly barbaric as any act performed by the Nazis during the rule of Adolf Hitler! Do
~ William Styron
I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.
~ Winston S. Churchill
I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion
~ Winston S. Churchill
Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.
~ Christopher Hitchens
Please keep abusing each other over differences of skin tone and absurdly tiny religious discrepancies. It's good for the country. Racism needs to rise in periods where slavery makes a comeback, because if all you simian-browed, atavistic gutter-plebes started cooperating, all of a sudden, you'd barbecue our prissy fannies in a hot ghetto second. Vent
~ Cintra Wilson
We live in a world that has popularized Black people showing the same hate towards white people that people like Martin Luther King Jr. died fighting to overcome. It's sad. Sad as hell.
~ Unknown
There was a deeper problem, and the deeper problem was racism. And how do you picket an attitude? How do you demonstrate against an attitude? And so it was recognized within SNCC that black people lacked power to control their lives, and that having the vote was not going to give them the power they needed to control their lives. And so people started talking about power for black people.
~ Unknown
Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context—randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out "I swear to God!" is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship.
~ Claudia Rankine
She has grown up, another decides, as if responding to the injustice of racism is childish and her previous demonstration of emotion was free-floating and detached from any external actions by others.
~ Claudia Rankine
Anti-black racism is in the culture. It's in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities, and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system.
~ Claudia Rankine
What is it we want for our daughter? Perhaps it's the ability to negotiate the world with an empathic imagination. The thing that brought both my husband and me to the gymnasium is the knowledge that though the deep-seated racist systems are reaffirmed and the evidence is there for us to see, I still want the world for my daughter that is more than this world, a world that has our daughter already in it.
~ Claudia Rankine
Now that there is no calling out of injustice, no yelling, no cursing, no finger wagging or head shaking, the media decides to take up the mantle when on December 12, 2012, two weeks after Serena is named WTA Player of the Year, the Dane Caroline Wozniacki, a former number-one player, imitates Serena by stuffing towels in her top and shorts, all in good fun, at an exhibition match. Racist? CNN wants to know if outrage is the proper response.
~ Claudia Rankine
a friend once told you there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.
~ Claudia Rankine
Senator Bernie Sanders, who was the hope of so many, considering Democratic losses after the 2018 midterm elections, remarked, "There are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American." How is not voting for someone simply because they're black not racist?
~ Claudia Rankine
After her three-second celebratory dance on center court at the All England Club, the American media reported, "And there was Serena … Crip-Walking all over the most lily-white place in the world…. You couldn't help but shake your head…. What Serena did was akin to cracking a tasteless, X-rated joke inside a church…. What she did was immature and classless.
~ Claudia Rankine
Later that same day I ask a white friend about white people speaking among themselves about their racism. It doesn't happen, she tells me. Nonetheless, she believes, that's how whites would learn to build stamina regarding their collusion with structural racism.
~ Claudia Rankine
there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.
~ Claudia Rankine
a friend once told you there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.
~ Claudia Rankine
For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler's remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.
~ Claudia Rankine