Quotes About Racism

History shows that black people have been second-class citizens, less than human. That's what had to happen with slavery. You had to dehumanise a person, to say, 'He is not like us. He is used to hard work in the sun. He can handle being whipped because he doesn't feel any pain. He doesn't need to be educated.'

First there was racism. Then liberals created institutional racism and coded racism. You can only hear it with a dog whistle.

After years in white theaters I dreaded working in colored houses. The noise, the stomping, whistling, and cheering that hadn't annoyed me when I was young was now something I dreaded.

I get that racism exists, but it's not a catalyst for my content. I don't need to talk about race to have material. My style of comedy is more self-deprecating. I think that makes me more relatable. When you deal with 'topics' - race, white versus black - you're not separating from the pack. You're doing what everybody else is doing.

Jim Crow laws stripped blacks of basic rights. Despite landmark civil rights laws, many public schools were still segregated, blacks still faced barriers to voting, and violence by white racists continued. Such open racism is mostly gone in America, but covert racism is alive and well.

Cassius Clay is a name that white people gave to my slave master. Now that I am free, that I don't belong anymore to anyone, that I'm not a slave anymore, I gave back their white name, and I chose a beautiful African one.

My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

What I did at Ole Miss had nothing to do with going to classes. My objective was to destroy the system of white supremacy.

I've been dealing with racism since I was a little kid! My dad's super black, from Puerto Rico. Then my mom's super white - she's Puerto Rican too, but she grew up in Milwaukee. As a Latino in the U.S. I've seen how we are treated differently based on the color of our skin.

When I was saying, 'White people go to hell,' I never had trouble finding a publisher. But when I say, 'Black and white unite and fight, destroy capitalism,' then you suddenly become unreasonable.

The norm is white, apparently, in the view of people who see things in that way. For them, the only reason you would introduce a black character is to introduce this kind of abnormality. Usually, it's because you're telling a story about racism or at least about race.

Ending the school-to-prison pipeline is not a small task and requires detangling the myth of white superiority from our entire education system.

We are concerned with that curious bunch of nonconformists who explain their participation in negative terms: that bunch of do-gooders that goes under all sorts of names - liberals, leftists, etc. These are the people who argue that they are not responsible for white racism and the country's 'inhumanity to the black man.'

Unfortunately, as I tell my white friends, we, as black people, we're never going to be successful - not because of you white people but because of other black people. When you're black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people.

The white man's dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities.

In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.

Racism has two primary functions: the oppression of people of color, which most people recognize, but also the simultaneous elevation of white people. You can't hold one group down without lifting the other up.

I went to an all white school where I dealt with racism.

It's important to recognise that opposing racism isn't just about presenting an alternative set of values; it's about looking at how the far right play on people's hardships in order to nurture a sense of enmity between white people and those racialised as migrants.

One of the problems with putting Huck Finn into a movie or on the stage is, you always make the white people stupid and racist. The point is, they don't know they're racist.

I hated, when I was a kid, being told that 'Black people don't do that.' And the white kids at school didn't accept me because I was black, and the black kids in my neighborhood didn't accept me because they thought I thought I was white.

And my point was one I think that you'd agree with, which is there's no room in America for a black racist, a Latino racist, or a white racist, or an Asian racist, or a Native American racist. Now, we're either color blind or we're not color blind.

I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man's inhuman treatment of the Negro.

Some white people are privileged, some aren't. Some black people are, some aren't. It's strikes me as, by definition, a racist attack in that it's making a generalization - a negative one - based on skin color.