Quotes About Discrimination

If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they're not happy.

Jim Crow laws stripped blacks of basic rights. Despite landmark civil rights laws, many public schools were still segregated, blacks still faced barriers to voting, and violence by white racists continued. Such open racism is mostly gone in America, but covert racism is alive and well.

For goodness sake, will they hear, will white people hear what we are trying to say? Please, all we are asking you to do is to recognize that we are humans, too.

To like an individual because he's black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn't white.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

I am certain that my white colleagues, when faced with an emergency situation, wouldn't think twice about calling the police. This, however, may not be the case for their black and Latino students.

I've been dealing with racism since I was a little kid! My dad's super black, from Puerto Rico. Then my mom's super white - she's Puerto Rican too, but she grew up in Milwaukee. As a Latino in the U.S. I've seen how we are treated differently based on the color of our skin.

If you grew up white before the civil rights movement anywhere in the South, all grown-ups lied. They'd tell you stuff like, 'Don't drink out of the colored fountain, dear, it's dirty.' In the white part of town, the white fountain was always covered with chewing gum and the marks of grubby kids' paws, and the colored fountain was always clean.

Black people can be the most conservative, the most discriminating. Especially among ourselves. It wasn't white people who said all black men have to wear baggy jeans.

The Muslim world just doesn't believe that skin color is all that important. Obama may be half-black, but he's still all-Western, according to them. It doesn't matter whether you're black, white or green - if you're not a devotee of Muhammad, you don't matter.

I know my destiny. I was born into animosity, bigotry and hatred. We had water for white folks, and water for coloured folks. White lines, black lines. I came from Beaufort in South Carolina, and it was tougher than Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

Racism has two primary functions: the oppression of people of color, which most people recognize, but also the simultaneous elevation of white people. You can't hold one group down without lifting the other up.

If I were white, I'd get less criticism.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

White Americans today don't know what in the world to do because when they put us behind them, that's where they made their mistake... they put us behind them, and we watched every move they made.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

I waited at the counter of a white restaurant for eleven years. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted.

Look at my skin - I am not of the white people.

If I had been white with the things I did, they never would have allowed me to get out of baseball.

The entire world is skewed from the white male perspective. If you're a woman, they have to say it's a female-driven comedy. If it's a comedy with Latinos in it, it's a Latino comedy. 'Normal' is white male, and I find that to be shocking and ridiculous.

If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?

I'm half-white and half-black. No-one will ever say I'm white, but all the road men think because I'm mixed race that I can't be bad because I'm light skin. It's crazy.

I've had a black guy call me a honky, and I've also been told that white people smell like bologna.

In the 1940s, traveling for an African was a complicated process. All Africans over the age of sixteen were compelled to carry 'Native passes' issued by the Native Affairs Department and were required to show that pass to any white policeman, civil servant, or employer. Failure to do so could mean arrest, trial, a jail sentence or fine.