Quotes About Racism

I'm from the South; there's been such progress since I was young, with racism, with feminism. The environment is next.

My dad prepared me for the worst of times while also enabling me to succeed in the best. He taught me to confront the insidiousness of racism head on, no matter what the ramification, so it will not fester. Defeat it and get past it. That was The Talk. Nothing scared me after that.

Londoners deserve a great, free music festival with excellent bands from around the world. They don't need to be hectored about why racism is bad or accosted by activists explaining why Castro is a hero.

Al Campanis made people finally understand what goes on behind closed doors - that there is racism in baseball.

African-Americans know about racism, but I don't think we really know the causes. I decided it's first of all a family problem.

In most of my encounters with Klan members, we would discuss reasons for why they were members in the first place.

At Grinnell College, for the first time in my life, I was in an all-white setting. It was a shocking experience.

The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.

There are plenty of African-Americans in this country - and I would say this goes right up to the White House - who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy.

My whiteness, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege, family support, and so many other factors shield me from some of the worst possible consequences - often fatal ones - that result from the toxic combination of misogyny, racism, and anti-trans sentiment.

I couldn't go to school with whites. Now there are schools that educate everyone.

You discover that the education the Negro gets is designed to keep him subservient. The poor black man is exploited by whites and by educated Negroes, too.

We've begun to put fear into those whites who think they can do anything they want to a black person and get away with it.

I am not naive, and I do realize that racism is alive and well in the United States of America. I am also fully aware that when segregation ended, we didn't all live happily ever after. No one can convince me, however, that life in America would be better if blacks and whites had stayed separate and unequal.

Whites would accuse you of causing trouble when all you were doing was acting like a normal human being instead of cringing.

I think the most harmful belief passed on to me - not always directly - was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up.

The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites.

Ninety years after slavery, blacks were still segregated from whites. They still had separate drinking fountains, separate restrooms, separate neighborhoods, and separate schools. They still were expected to sit at the back of the bus.

The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.

Sadly, whites are rarely open to what black and brown folks have to say regarding their ongoing experiences with racist mistreatment. And we are especially reluctant to discuss what that mistreatment means for us as whites: namely that we end up with more and better opportunities as the flipside of discrimination.

When I was born in 1959, the hospital in which I arrived had separate floors for black babies and white babies, and it was then illegal for blacks and whites to marry in many states.

The mainstream media choose to flaunt story lines that make white America appear guilty of continued institutional racism, while black racism against whites is ignored as an acceptable disposition given our nation's history.

One consequence of racism and segregation is that many American whites know little or nothing about the daily lives of African Americans. Black America's least-understood communities are those poor, hyper-segregated places we once called ghettos. These neighborhoods are not far away, but they might as well be on the moon.

Hillbilly stereotypes have always made it easier for middle-class whites to presume that racism is the exclusive province of 'that kind' of person.