Quotes About Racism

It was more comforting to believe that a white powder was the cause of black anger, and that getting rid of the white powder would render black Americans docile and on their knees once again.

At first, ordinary citizens had taken matters into their own hands against this Yellow Peril. In Los Angeles, twenty-one Chinese people were shot,197 hanged, or burned alive by white mobs, while in San Francisco, officials tried to forcibly move everyone in Chinatown into an area reserved for pig farms and other businesses that were designated as dirty and disease-ridden, until the courts ruled the policy was unconstitutional.198

Racism is very painful. That's life. It never ends.

It was like a disease, and these children whom I loved without caring about their skins or their backgrounds, they were tainted with the hateful virus which attacked their vision, distorting everything that was not white or English.

We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place.

In the end, Americans will have to decide whether or not this country will remain racist. To make that decision, we will have to avoid the trap of placing the burden of our national sins on the shoulders of Donald Trump. We need to look inward. Trump is us. Or better, Trump is you.

White liberals weren't loud racists. They were simply racial philanthropists who, after a good deed, return to their suburban homes with their white picket fences or to their apartments in segregated cities with their consciences content. Baldwin was not shy about calling this out.

In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself. I don't know what "the Negro Problem" means to white people, but this is what it means to Negroes.

Just twelve years after the last major legislation of the Great Society—the Fair Housing Act of 1968—aimed, however clumsily, at addressing inequalities produced by generations of racist policies, the country elected a president whose charge was to dismantle it all.

Trump cannot be cordoned off into a corner with evil, racist demagogues. We make him wholly bad in order to protect our innocence. He is made to bear the burdens of all our sins, when he is in fact a clear reflection of who we actually are.

In the face of such evil, the federal government continued to slow-walk substantive reform, and white people continued to be white people.

landing at Montgomery's airport and feeling the intense hatred in the eyes of three white men

The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world.

Baldwin put it this way in No Name in the Street: "One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history…has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave.

To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior agreement and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation," he wrote.

the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by

black people are essentially inferior, less human than white people, and therefore deserving of their particular station in American life.

people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn't…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one's life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn't, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble. American

The lynched relative; the buried son or daughter killed at the hands of the police; the millions locked away to rot in prisons; the children languishing in failed schools; the smothering, concentrated poverty passed down from generation to generation; and the indifference to lives lived in the shadows of the American dream are generally understood as exceptions to the American story, not the rule. Blasphemous facts must be banished from view by a host of public rituals and incantations.

The seventies involved a confrontation with a frightening truth: that despite the sacrifices and costs of the black freedom struggle, the country remained profoundly racist and, no matter its proclamations to the contrary, white America was perfectly comfortable with that fact.

White liberals weren't loud racists. They were simply racial philanthropists who, after a good deed, return to their suburban homes with their white picket fences or to their apartments in segregated cities with their consciences content.

The whites that wanted to live like the blacks were as immoral as you could imagine. Ask any black and they will tell you that you haven't lived until you have been a nigger on a Saturday night.

savages. Dirty savages.

Whereas for most whites racism is prejudice, for most people of color racism is systemic or institutionalized.