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Quotes About Racism

To serve a dictator, one must be gullible and ambitious and have no scruples. One must not mind being insulted by a Führer or else have an intellect so deficient as not to notice insults. Who else would fawningly and forever feed the vanity of a man who never listened but only spouted inane theories of conquest, racism, and economic nonsense, no matter how hypnotic his delivery?
~ Richard W. Sonnenfeldt
This is why loneliness creates such a deep ache in our bones. It's holding up—and working against—the direction the universe has been heading for over thirteen billion years. Same with racism. Regardless of where we come from or what we look like, we're all humans, and when humans fail to bond and unite and connect with other humans, that's going against the direction the universe has been going for thirteen billion years.
~ Rob Bell
It was as a result of his courage that two white men were on trial for killing a Negro, a trial in which, whatever the result, "there is a kind of majesty. And we owe that sight to Mose Wright, who was condemned to bow all his life, and had enough left to raise his head and look the enemy in those terrible eyes when he was sixty-four.
~ Robert A. Caro
Emmett Till's murder" instilled in Anne Moody, a fourteen-year-old black girl from Alabama, "the fear of being killed just because I was black." It was the senselessness of the murder of the fourteen-year-old boy that she couldn't get out of her mind, she was to say. "I didn't know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.
~ Robert A. Caro
know. I've been in classes with her. She's bright, but she's screwed up. Jesus, they're so miserable, those kids, always so goddamn unhappy about racism and sexism and imperialism and militarism and capitalism. Man, I grew up in a tarpaper house in Fayette, Mississippi, with ten other kids. We were trying to stay alive; we didn't have time to be that goddamn unhappy.
~ Robert B. Parker
Finally it was probably less the poverty that bred crime than the sour stench of racism that hung over anyplace where people are separated out by kind.
~ Robert B. Parker
Most Americans don't know that military coups swept over half the country, with the acquiescence of the federal government. But that is what happened. The legitimate governments of southern states and cities were overthrown by force, by white supremacist paramilitary organizations. Black people and Republicans were disenfranchised and massacred. They call it the Redemption of the South, and what it means is we turn away from the idea of equality.
~ Kermit Roosevelt III
But we do go forward. Inspired, once again, by military service and a war against a racist enemy—this time Nazi Germany—Black Americans press their calls for equality. The Supreme Court invalidates government racial segregation, in public schools and elsewhere.
~ Kermit Roosevelt III
But the idea that letting people know how deeply rooted racism has been will make them lose faith in America is both patronizing and implausible. Patronizing because it suggests that some Americans can't handle the truth, and implausible because the people most likely to lose faith—Black Americans—know the problem of racism all too well already.
~ Kermit Roosevelt III
She recalled hearing how after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, they had built prison camps faster than medical facilities. They had expected riots and so had put people of color in jail preemptively. But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages, the age of fascisms both home and abroad. Since
~ Kim Stanley Robinson
Many historians have concluded that one reason for the increasingly negative view of the Negro through the later eighteenth century was the need to salve the consciences of those who trafficked in and exploited enslaved men and women. As Grégoire put it, bleakly but bluntly, "People have slandered Negroes, first in order to get the right to enslave them, and then to justify themselves for having enslaved them. . . ."14
~ Kwame Anthony Appiah
I am a Muslim and . . . my religion makes me be against all forms of racism. It keeps me from judging any man by the color of his skin. It teaches me to judge him by his deeds .
~ Malcolm X
I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.
~ Winston Churchill
I guess when it comes to this privileged White racist feminist movement they respect someone who treats them rough: John Wayne. Frank Sinatra. Phillip Roth.
~ Ishmael Reed
Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of "culturists.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi. The vicious circle: a chance historical situation is translated into a rigid social system.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted, and that the place of racism in imperial ideology has now been replaced by 'culturism'.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Privilege theory, we might say, "wants social change with no actual change." Rather than addressing the social antagonisms immanent to capitalism, it misapprehends the framework (and its enablement of racism).
~ Zahi Zalloua
No one who offers the "yes, but" rationalization actually engages in racist violence or even thinks that they are condoning it. But they are virtually guaranteeing that it will continue because what they are doing is facilitating it.
~ Deborah E. Lipstadt
Antisemitism is not the hatred of people who happen to be Jews. It is hatred of them because they are Jews.
~ Deborah E. Lipstadt
Though one may not find an overtly racist or Nazi symbol among the clean-cut and well-dressed adherents of these new groups, their views are just as extremist as those of the most committed member of the KKK. They advocate a race-based white supremacism. For them, an American citizen is someone who is white and Christian.
~ Deborah E. Lipstadt
Participants in the massacre were later tried in Tucson and acquitted. To murder an Indian was considered no crime.
~ Dee Brown
The clerisy imagined in the nineteenth century nationalism, socialism, imperialism, and racism. Such theories resulted during the twentieth century in actually existing socialism and nationalism and national-socialist-racist imperialism, and the butcher bill for them all. In the late twentieth century the clerisy turned its hand to theorizing evil consumerism and environmental decay. Uh-oh. Watch out, dears, for fresh results in the twenty-first century.
~ Deirdre N. McCloskey
Despite their marriage license and four children, black couples were not permitted to live as man and wife on the Reservation.
~ Denise Kiernan