Quotes About Racism

Yes, the whites were as miserable as their black victims, I thought. If this country can't find its way to a human path, if it can't inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us, black as well as white, are doing down the same drain...

Bob had been caught by the white death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the South. I had heard whispered tales of black boys having sex relations with white prostitutes in the hotels in town, but I had never paid any close attention to them; now those tales came home to me in the form of the death of a man I knew. I did not search for a job that day; I returned home

His jobs in the South were marked by harassment by whites and by his own disdain for what segregation and racism had done to distort the humanity of his fellow blacks, as he saw it.

There were many more folk ditties, some mean, others filthy, all of them cruel. No one ever thought of questioning our right to do this; our mothers and parents generally approved, either actively or passively. To hold an attitude of antagonism or distrust toward Jews was bred in us from childhood; it was not merely racial prejudice, it was a part of our cultural heritage.

They were paying me to distract Bigger with ping-pong, checkers, swimming, marbles, and baseball in order that he might not roam the streets and harm the valuable white property which adjoined the Black Belt. I am not condemning boys' clubs and ping-pong as such; but these little stopgaps were utterly inadequate to fill up the centuries-long chasm of emptiness which American civilization had created in these Biggers.

A pro–civil rights columnist for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger noted the familiar faces from his reporting on White Citizens Council meetings back in the 1950s and '60s. Only one thing was different: "Their enemy now is not the black man but 'liberalism,' in any form, as they see it.

We came when a lot of other Asian people came, after the law changed." "I remember that," I say. And I do, more or less. I remember Kennedy talking about the need for it—calling the old system of racist quotas intolerable—though it was Johnson who finally signed it.

He was the kind of man George had been fighting for a decade: an ugly, fat, foul-mouthed, stupid white racist.

Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made this century, to the proposition that"—he had gone formal, but now he reverted to plain language—"race has no place in American life or law.

Our great stumbling block, in our stride toward freedom, is not the White Citizens' Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner. It's the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who constantly says, like Bobby Kennedy: 'I agree with the goal you seek, but I cannot condone your methods.

Our great stumbling block, in our stride toward freedom, is not the White Citizens' Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner. It's the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice;

In America in 1961, while the police looked on, white racists could attack civil rights protestors, break their bones, try to burn them to death – and get away with it.

Fascism blames problems on a false cause—people of other races.

Our great stumbling block, in our stride toward freedom, is not the White Citizens' Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner. It's the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who constantly says, like Bobby Kennedy: 'I agree with the goal you seek, but I cannot condone your methods.' He paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom

Y admite que deberá discriminar a los árabes en favor de los judíos, pero da la casualidad de que el fascismo es la combinación del militarismo y el racismo, precisamente aquello contra lo que usted lucha.

If you think this ethnocentric stage—with its tendencies toward racism, sexism/patriarchy, misogyny, mega-tribal dominance, oppression, and fundamentalist religion—sounds a bit like hardcore far-Right Republicans, and that it starts to push into recognized Trump territory, you'd be right.

By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.

Find a balance between one's responsibility as a white person to confront acts of racism and one's subconscious sense of power and privilege over people of color when reacting to the [racist] event.

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.

No white group has founded a major religion on this planet. The major religious were started in the Orient and the Middle East, not in Greece and Rome. I always knew you racists didn't have a prayer.

My words are not that powerful. I started saying in 1985 I don't think we should have a music talking about ni**ers and b*tches and h*es. It had no impact. I've said it. I've repeated it. I still repeat it. To me, that's more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee.

I don't think it is fair to tell our people to be nonviolent unless someone is out there making the Klan and the Citizens Council and these other groups also be nonviolent.

They came up with a civil rights bill in 1964, supposedly to solve our problem, and after the bill was signed, three civil rights workers were murdered in cold blood. And the FBI head, Hoover, admits that they know who did it, they've known ever since it happened, and they've done nothing about it. Civil rights bill down the drain.

They controlled it so tight -- they told those Negroes what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn't make; and then told them to get out town by sundown. And everyone of those Toms was out of town by sundown. Now I know you don't like my saying this. But I can back it up. It was a circus, a performance that beat anything Hollywood could ever do, the performance of the year.