Quotes About Race

We need to try to see individuals in order to do any kind of justice. The idea of a binary world of monsters and saints whose unchanging goodness or badness is evident from one or a few actions, from their poverty, or from their race, is false" - Larry Krasner

The food of fear is ignorance, Mother Gundring used to say. The death of fear is knowledge. When you study a race of men you find they are just men like any others.

Ontologies are accessible only if we engage how a category such as race is secured and made credible and on which its effects rely. These need not be mutually exclusive analytical strategies.15 Here I ask the reader to reconsider how "racial regimes of truth" and our historiographic narratives of them have produced recurrent declarations of "new" racisms.

Lutie watched her from the front porch. Damn white people, she thought. Damn them. And then—but it isn't that woman's fault. It's your fault. That's right, but the reason Pop came here to live was because he couldn't get a job and we had to have the State children because Jim couldn't get a job. Damn white people, she repeated.

And Jim couldn't get a job, though he hunted for one — desperately, eagerly, anxiously. Walking from one employment agency to another; spending long hours in the musty agency waiting-rooms, reading old newspapers. Waiting, waiting, waiting to be called up for a job. He would come home shivering from the cold, saying, 'God damn white people anyway. I don't want favors. All I want is a job. Just a job. Don't they know if I know how I'd change the color of my skin?

When she was in high school she had believed that white people wanted their children to be president of the United States; that most of them worked hard with that goal in mind. And if not president--well, perhaps a cabinet member.

Mrs. Hedges, I believe you're prejudiced. I didn't know you were that human.' 'I ain't prejudiced,' she said firmly. 'I just ain't got no use for white folks. I don't want 'em anywhere near me. I don't even wanta have to look at 'em. I put up with you because you don't ever stop to think whether folks are white or black and you don't really care. That sort of takes you out of the white folks class.

Listen, Junto,' he said. 'They can wave flags. They can tell me the Germans cut off baby's behinds and rape women and turn black men into slaves. They can tell me any damn thing. None of it means nothing.' 'Why?' 'Because, no matter how scared they are of Germans, they're still more scared of me. I'm black, see? And they hate Germans, but they hate me worse. If that wasn't so they wouldn't have a separate army for black men.

Lutie sat down near the back of the room. It was filled with colored women, sitting in huddled-over positions. They sat quietly, not moving. Their patient silence filled the room, made her uneasy. Why were all of them colored? Was it because the mothers of white children had safe places for them to play in, because the mothers of white children didn't have to work?

Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.

Only the Black woman can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.

There are many compelling reasons why social scientists should turn more attention to the situation of whites in the underclass. Prime among these is that researchers and politicians have constructed a grossly distorted image of poverty in this country. While whites constitute a vast majority of the poor population in the United States, blackness composes the most familiar visage in representations of poverty.

From the divergence between black flesh and yellow ornament, we have arrived at this convergence: flesh that passes through objecthood needs ornament to get back to itself.

I offer the yellow woman here not as the real but rather as a conceptual category and a critical agent,

Ostensibly about protecting laborers and women, the goal was in fact to, in Horace Page's words, "end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women," making it quite clear that gender and race were significant factors in immigration policy and that there was tremendous anxiety over and backlash against the Supreme Court's decision in Chy Lung.

one of the most fascinating aspects of this case must be the question of what constitutes "visual evidence" and how racialized femininity impacts and alters that assumption.

What happens when we accept that style, mediated through yet detached from a racial referent, may not be simply the excess or the opposite of ontology but may in fact be a precondition for embodiment, an insight that challenges the very foundation of the category of the human? What is at stake here is not just the objectification of people but also how that objectification opens up a constitutive estrangement within the articulation of proper personhood.

In short, race making in the nineteenth century is also an artisanal project, as indebted to ornamental practice and material making as it is to the pseudobiology of early ethnography.

We know by now that Asiatic femininity in the Western racial imagination has never needed the biological or the natural to achieve a full, sensorial, agile, and vivid presence. Asiatic femininity has always been prosthetic. The dream of the yellow woman subsumes a dream about the inorganic. She is an, if not the, original cyborg.

Wait! I'm the one who's supposed to chase!

Their (the teenagers) way of thinking seemed to have been "God helps those that help themselves" instead of "When we get to heaven things will be different, there won't be no black or white," which was what my grandmother thought.

Because slavery in the United States was racially based, it was easy to graft the legally imposed incapacities of slavery onto Black people as a group, making incapacity an inherent feature of the race.

People want the individuals from the past they admire to be "right" on the question of race—no matter how wrong they actually were—so that admiring such people poses no problem. The difficulty is that not many European-Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were what we would consider to be "right" on the question of race, which, at a minimum, requires believing in the equal humanity of African Americans.

Empowered Black people made the intangible benefits derived from Whiteness less valuable.