Quotes About Awareness

My mum will not speak above a low whisper in public because she doesn't want to draw attention to herself.

I do talk to myself, just not in a whisper. But I have caught myself sometimes.

I'm whispering so that the media doesn't hear me.

When hearing aids were first mentioned, I pictured myself as that old geezer at the back of the church with the whistling ear trumpet, but you can't see these Phonak hearing aids, and people don't realise you've got them in.

The parrot's so funny. He imitates me and I don't even realize he's doing it. I'm walking around the house talking to myself and whistling and the next day he's said something I've said... it's scary you know?

White people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong.

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.

My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

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.

The same way that racism is a white person's problem, violence against women is a men's problem.

I had a few brushes with death, where I nearly chose to go. The final one in 1996 did it for me. I suddenly had that feeling that I wasn't indestructible. There was no big white light experience, I just felt this complete blackness and a huge voice inside me saying, 'This is not right.'

One of the problems with putting Huck Finn into a movie or on the stage is, you always make the white people stupid and racist. The point is, they don't know they're racist.

The white man is destroying the world.

As a young black woman, I notice at times in the mainstream media framing of the 'me too' movement you see a white female face or a white male face, and that type of questioning and interrogation needs to happen.

As Black people, we're very used to empathizing with the world through white people's eyes, because they're the protagonists. I know what it's like to look at the world and empathize with Superman because I spent my whole life doing that.

It is not, nor will it ever be, white people's responsibility to teach black children our unique American history.

Thank God for the efforts of Black Lives Matter - we've seen an awakening in this era in a way we didn't see in Daddy's era in terms of people coming to grips with white privilege.

Being a straight white guy in his, like, early twenties - there's some sort of thing about it. A sort of privilege, a sort of anger or something. You just say some really stupid things.

White fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.