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Quotes About Racism

Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard.26 The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.
~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The English government paid bounties for the Irish heads. Later only the scalp or ears were required. A century later in North America, Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in the same manner. Although the Irish were as "white" as the English, transforming them into alien others to be exterminated previewed what came to be perceived as racialist when applied to Indigenous peoples of North America and to Africans.
~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
as an ideology involves much more than skin color, although skin color has been and continues to be a key component of racism in the United States. White supremacy can be traced to the colonizing ventures of the Christian Crusades in Muslim-controlled territories and to the Protestant colonization of Ireland.
~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Whitman explicitly grounded this prescription in racism: "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history.… A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out." The whole world would benefit from US expansion: "We pant to see our country and its rule far-reaching. What has miserable, inefficient Mexico … to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?
~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Also part of the Christian colonizers' outlook was a belief in white supremacy. As an 1878 US Protestant evangelical hymn suggests—"Are your garments spotless? / Are they white as snow? / Are they washed in the blood of the lamb?"—whiteness as an ideology involves much more than skin color, although skin color has been and continues to be a key component of racism in the United States.
~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
have grown up with racism all my life. When I was a child, watching cowboys and Indians on TV, I would root for the cavalry, not the Indians. It was that bad. I was that far toward my own destruction."23
~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Wilf: God bless the cactuses! The Doctor: That's cactI. Alien: And that's racist!
~ Russell T. Davies
Three plagues, three contagions, threaten the world. The first is the plague of nationalism. The second is the plague of racism. The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.
~ Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski
Vow," he cried, reeling. "It isn't bad enough being a brown dude in America, you're telling me I'm half fucking goblin as well.
~ Salman Rushdie
The fact that millions of people use the term morality as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.
~ Sam Harris
Religion raises the stakes of human conflict much higher than tribalism, racism, or politics ever can, as it is the only form of in-group/out-group thinking that casts the differences between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments.
~ Sam Harris
Malcolm X finally became the person he was meant and raised to be. He fought against the forces of racism to return to that. Malcolm wanted to inspire other people to find their own strength.
~ Kekla Magoon
Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.
~ Oprah Winfrey
Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.
~ Alice Walker
One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.
~ Alice Walker
I thought black people superior people. Not simply superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them; but to everyone. Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday school class and grin for television over their victory, i.e. , the death of four small black girls.
~ Alice Walker
Why can't Tashi come to school? she asked me. When I told her the Olinka don't believe in educating girls she said, quick as a flash, They're like white people at home who don't want colored people to learn.
~ Alice Walker
and when we talk about holy books and hooded men and death, why do we never mention the kkk?
~ Alix Olson
the so-called Waidhofen Manifesto of the mid-1880s barring Jews from membership in student organizations and fraternities. He quotes these lines from that document, and they are explicit: "Everyone of a Jewish mother, every human being in whose veins flows Jewish blood, is from the day of his birth without honor and void of all the refined emotions.… He is ethically subhuman.
~ Allen Shawn
Aisha was ten and didn't understand half of what Colson said, up there on the stage, dressed in purple velvet like he was Prince. She couldn't follow the words, but she didn't have any problem making sense of the way Juliet looked at him. Aisha didn't have any problem figuring out why Juliet's cousin hated Romeo either. Tybalt didn't want some smooth-talking black kid crowding in on any white girl, let alone someone in his family.
~ Joe Hill
Hap, even tough I'm a racist castrating bitch that wants you to be better than you are, wants you to do something with your life besides be a knockabout, do you think you could find it in your heart, in your itty-bitty white man's dick, to get a hard-on for me? In other words, want to fuck?
~ Joe R. Lansdale
Perhaps the most telling criticism of suburban migration focused on an expanding racial divide between the heavily white suburbs and the increasingly black inner cities. Clearly, some new suburbanites, and the developers catering to them, shared a deep-seated racism: In 1970, nearly 95 percent of suburbanites were white.
~ Joel Kotkin
To these old hands, rock and roll sounded like musical illiteracy, the undignified, untutored keenings of woebegone Negroes, hicks, and juvenile delinquents.
~ Joel Selvin
It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war—it was part of the point.
~ Johann Hari