Quotes About Prejudice

I traveled from city to city in those days, and the view from within the ghettos was terrible and terrifying. While white people in the periphery were arming themselves against the day when they would have to defend themselves from attack by blacks (and really believed someone was fomenting a racial war in which black people would rise up and attack them), black people mostly without arms huddled inside the ghettos feeling that they were surrounded by armed whites.

Local white leadership was discredited in the eyes of black people, too, by their insistence on asking me, when we met to discuss the local events, usually with black people, if I had discovered who was the traveling black agitator who had come in and stirred up their "good black people." And had I discovered if there were any communists behind the disruptions?

Some whites, who had never really understood, were offended by this sudden death of their role as the "good white leading the poor black out of the jungle." Many of these were among the saddest people of our time, good-hearted whites who had dedicated themselves to helping black people become imitation whites, to "bringing them up to our level," without ever realizing what a deep insult this attitude can be.

In Black Like Me, I tried to establish one simple fact, which was to reveal the insanity of a situation where a man is judged by his skin color, by his philosophical "accident" - rather than by who he is in his humanity.

But part of that incipient racism had always led whites to assume the leadership positions and perpetuated the view that whites rather than blacks were the heroes of the movement.

A couple of years ago I was seated in an auditorium in Detroit where Reverend Cleage was explaining to a conference of priests that what they called "black separatists" were in reality men who recognized the implacability of a white-imposed separation.

The vast difference between what this country was saying and apparently believing, and what the black man was experiencing, was embittering.

The core concept in Griffin's writings about racism—that members of dominant groups tend to view minorities, because they seem different in some extrinsic way, as intrinsically other, and "as merely underdeveloped versions of their own imprisoning culture"—was intuited in Black Like Me and articulated in a seminal essay, "The Intrinsic Other

I knew, and every black man there knew, that I, as a man now white once again, could say the things that needed saying but would be rejected if black men said them.

Racists are not the pipe-smoking type, I thought to myself.

My revulsion turned to grief that my own people could give the hate stare, could shrivel men's souls, could deprive humans of rights they unhesitatingly accord their livestock. I

They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can't deserve our rights." Others

He kept himself in line with popular opinion, which meant popular prejudice.

Some wanted to know where they could find girls, wanted us to get Negro girls for them. We learned to spot these from the moment they sat down, for they were immediately friendly and treated us with the warmth and courtesy of equals. I mentioned this to Sterling. Yeah, when they want to sin, they're very democratic, he said.

If we could only put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustice of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice.

We must return to them their lawful rights, assure equality of justice - and then everybody leave everybody else to hell alone. Paternalistic - we show our prejudice in our paternalism - we downgrade their dignity.

Phew!" His small blue eyes shone with repugnance, a look of such unreasoning contempt for my skin that it filled me with despair. It was a little thing, but piled on all the other little things it broke something in me. Suddenly I had had enough. Suddenly I could stomach no more of this degradation - not of myself but of all men who were black like me.

It's a vicious cycle, Mr. Griffin, and I don't know how we'll get out of it. They put us low and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low we can't deserve our rights.

I learned a strange thing - that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word n***** always leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it and always it stings. And always it casts the person using it into a category of brute ignorance.

Though not all, by any means, were so open about their purposes, all of them showed us how they felt about the Negro, the idea that we were people of such morality that nothing could offend us. These men, young and old, however, were less offensive than the ones who treated us like machines, as though we had no human existence whatsoever. When they paid me, they looked as though I were a stone or a post. They looked and saw nothing.

But since racism always hides under a respectable guise - usually the guise of patriotism and religion - a great many people loathed us for knocking holes in these respectable guises. It was realization that racial injustice was for the good of all society, not just for the good of the oppressed.

The Southern Negro will not tell the white man the truth. He long ago learned that if he speaks a truth unpleasing to the white, the white will make life miserable for him

My dear boy, Miss Frost said sharply. My dear boy, please don't put a label on me - don't make a category before you get to know me!

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.