Quotes About Racism

Be nonviolent only with those who are nonviolent to you. And when you can bring me a nonviolent racist, bring me a nonviolent segregationist, then I'll get nonviolent. But don't teach me to be nonviolent until you teach some of those crackers to be nonviolent.

I am blessed to travel this country to talk about racism. Yes, its a blessing, but in every place someone says, 'If you stop talking about race, racism will go away.' That doesn't even make stupid sense. The reality is that we talk about race all the time, in corridors, in offices, at ballgames, but we do not often talk about it in places where our ideas are challenged."

Young visitors to the museum ask me, "What was it like to live during the civil rights struggle?" I gently tell them that we are living during the civil rights struggle. -David Pilgrim

I want it said loudly and clearly that we can define racism in many ways, but it is, in my opinion, intellectually disingenuous to define it in a way that trivializes the role that racial hatred plays. Certainly, not all racism is hate-driven, but to ignore the connection between racial hate and racism is to reduce the concept of racism to a useless theoretical abstraction.

But the Arabs and the Africans and the Hispanics—what had they contributed in the past five hundred years other than terrorism, bad music and crack cocaine?

The Arabs—she liked to think of them as the cockroaches of the human race—were spreading like a toxic ooze across the major cities of Europe, poisoning civilized society and watering down the gene pool.

In San Francisco, racism came at you with a smile.

I never could stand racism or indifference to poverty. That doesn't make me a lefty ideologue. It makes me an ordinary American.

War, hate, jealousy, racism - what are they but manifestations of fear?

Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who's listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It's hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like that guy, he's cool. How is he less than me?

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.

Now, it's a known fact that racism comes in two forms: that practiced by whites— heinous and inexcusable, whatever its motives—and that practiced by blacks—quite justified, whatever its excesses, since it's merely the expression of a righteous revenge, and it's up to the whites to be patient and understanding.

Racism is not merely about individual chauvinism, prejudice, or bigotry. Ruth Glimore reminds us that it is about the ways different groups are 'vulnerable to premature death,' whether at the hands of the state or structures that kill.

Institutional neglect of racism and injustice is the exercise of power, the kind of power that refuses to notice and refuses to speak.

But racism and inequality would never end if Blacks focused on easing white anxiety.

At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair. For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there any chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing. Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia…

It seems nostalgia runs rampant among many Euro-Americans: a nostalgia for the days of unchallenged White Supremacy-both moral and material-when life was simple.

Racism is a poison so insidious it finds its way through the tiniest slit in the soul and does its damage there even before one is aware.

It's frequently pointed out that plenty of good people work in criminal justice. That's true, but it's also beside the point. Racist policing isn't a problem caused by one bad apple or even a dozen bad apples. It's a structural problem. Its a problem that begins with persistent racism in our country, which in turn feeds the way we approach criminal justice. It's a broken system, and eliminating a few bad apples won't fix it.

Claims such as I'm not a racist or so-and-so is not a racist may sound harmless to some, but to many they cut deep. Familiar denials like these so often seem to be the justification for a second, unspoken part to that sentence: and therefore I don't have to do anything about racism. And that's the part that is just plain wrong.

The term 'racism' was coined in the 1930s, primarily as a response to the Nazi project of making Germany judenrein, or 'clean of Jews'. The

There is a lack of understanding on white people's part that it is not just a question of their own individual prejudice or lack of it, but of how racism works in a systematic and structural form to disadvantage ethnic minorities. And there is a taken-for-granted lens and experience of whiteness which makes for ignorance and blindness to the discrimination that ethnic minorities suffer in white-dominated societies.

Whites simply do not experience either what have come to be called the 'micro-aggressions' of everyday racism—habitually being followed by security guards in department stores is one extremely familiar experience; noticing the discomfort of white people in your presence is another

Colourblind racism asserts that there are no real problems with racism in our society, that challenges stem from individuals rather than our institutions and collective thinking and behavior.