Quotes About Racism

you saw something come between them and reason. You saw the same thing that night in front of the jail. When that crew went away, they didn't go as reasonable men, they went because we were there. There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn't be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins.

It might be because he knows in his heart that very few people in Maycomb really believed his and Mayella's yarns. He thought he'd be a hero, but all he got for his pain was… was, okay, we'll convict this Negro but get back to your dump.

All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbors was, that if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white.

I guess Tom was tired of white men's chances, and preferred to take his own.

It's hard to explain - ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody's favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It's slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody....baby, it's never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn't hurt you.

Llorar por el infierno puro y simple en que unas personas hunden a otras... sin detenerse a pensarlo tan sólo. Llorar por el infierno en que los hombres blancos hunden a los de color, sin pensar que también son personas.

If you had been on that jury, son, and eleven other boys like you, Tom would have been a free man... (Lee 251)

confident that you gentlemen will go along with them on the assumption-the evil assumption-that all negro men are not to be trusted, all negro men are basically immoral beings, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber which we know it is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin.

Infant mortality of African Americans is twice that of whites, and black babies born in more racially segregated cities have higher rates of mortality. The life expectancy of African Americans is as much as six years less than that of whites.

Betsey's voice has been silenced by history, but as one reads Sims's biographers and his own memoirs, a haughty, self-absorbed researcher emerges, a man who bought black women slaves and addicted them to morphine in order to perform dozens of exquisitely painful, distressingly intimate vaginal surgeries. Not until he had experimented with his surgeries on Betsey and her fellow slaves for years did Sims essay to cure white women.

I've written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.

I think segregation is bad, I think it's wrong, it's immoral. I'd fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don't need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.

A group of white South Africans recently killed a black lawyer because he was black. That was wrong. They should have killed him because he was a lawyer.

If you're quiet, knowing that there's a culture of racism inside most police departments, and you're not saying anything, you are on the wrong side of history.

Comedy can always be taken the wrong way. If I do a bit that is meant to diffuse racism or sexism, I'm not going to avoid it on the chance that a small portion of the audience might take it the wrong way.

When I wrote the song, The Way It Is, I wanted to move people to take a stand on civil rights in this country.

Imagine if a mob of Black people wanted to go in the White House. Imagine what'd happen. It'd be tear gas. It'd be rubber bullets. It'd be the whole nine yards.

First of all, do I think there's some racists in the Tea Party? Yeah. I'm an ordained United Methodist pastor; there's some racists in the Methodist church. I don't know if there's a body that does not have some racists in it.

Yeah, race exists. Racism is still here, and it's doing well. Turn on the news. I don't think me and my comedy can really change that.

But certainly in my grandmother's time - and when I was growing up, yeah, Demetrie's bathroom was on the side of the house, it was a separate door. Still, to this day, I've never been in that room.

I remember during Easter one year, I was to get a pair of black patent shoes but you could only get them from the white stores, so my mother drew the outline of my feet on a brown paper bag in order to get the closest size, because we weren't allowed to go in the store to try them on.

Blackface remains exoticist and offensive as a practice, not just because of its long tradition of being used to mock black selfhood, sexuality, and speech but because of its assertion that black people are merely white people sullied by dark skin.

Through the years, people like the KKK and skinheads kinda kidnapped the Dixie or Southern flag from its tradition and the heritage of the soldiers.

In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage.