Quotes About Race

In Living in Spanglish I posit the coming of existence of this forwars-looking race that obliterates all races, stripping away Vasaconelos's petty resentment of Anglo culture and patronizing Euro-centrist, and acknowledge a cultural-economic inevitability that is hemispheric in nature. Note: Jose Vasaconelos wrote 1925 essay "La Raza cosmica" [The Cosmic Race] asserting, "Por mi raza hablara mi espiritu [The Spirit will speak through my race.

But, in the end, we have to allow this "innocent" idea of white America to die. It is irredeemable, but that does not mean we are too.

The task at hand is not about securing the goodness of the American Idea or about perfecting the union. It is about according dignity and standing to all Americans no matter the color of their skin.

We must remove our mask to call attention to white advantage. That may help us understand one another a bit better. It may bridge divides, disrupt assumptions and stereotypes that block empathy and get in the way of serious efforts to achieve our country. As it stands, we don't really talk frankly about race. And too many people are too damn scared to say so.

As white America chose itself over a truly just and multiracial society,

thirty years after Baldwin's death we are still wrestling with the fact that so many Americans continue to hold the view that ours is a white nation.

Color," as he wrote in 1963, "is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.

But, if I am not the nigger, and if it's true that your invention reveals you, then who is the nigger? I am not the victim here….So I give you your problem back. You're the nigger, baby, it isn't me.

For Baldwin, even in his later work, the category of race all too often pulls us out of the places where the hard work of self-examination happens. It can easily become an illusion of safety, because so many questions are settled beforehand by the assumptions and stereotypes that come with our understanding of race.

Color does not say, once and for all, who we are and who we will forever be, nor does it accord anyone a different moral standing because they happen to be one color as opposed to another.

tell my students at Princeton that it was just down the street, at a restaurant on Route 1, that Baldwin hurled a glass at a waitress and shattered a mirror after he was refused service and ended up having to run for his life.

White people deserved whatever happened to them, he said. The problem is that we don't deserve any of it.

in the end, we have to allow this "innocent" idea of white America to die. It is irredeemable, but that does not mean we are too.

To be sure, Cleaver's idea of himself as a virile black man was central to his politics.

black people are essentially inferior, less human than white people, and therefore deserving of their particular station in American life.

But, like Baldwin, King struggled with America's commitment to the belief that white people mattered more and to the lie that made it palatable: I must honestly confess that I go through moments of disappointment when I have to recognize that there aren't enough white persons in our country who are willing to cherish democratic principles over privilege. But I am grateful to God that some are left.

what W.E.B. Du Bois described as "a hope not hopeless but unhopeful.

Some white people hate black people, and some white people love black people, some black people hate white people, and some black people love white people. So you see it's not an issue of black and white, it's an issue of Lovers and Haters.

The old grim story so many times enacted – for the poor human race has always longed for a Redeemer to take up the burdens that human people themselves alone must carry.

A race lacking respect for women would never advance socially or politically.

If race disappears as a category of official division, as it has in most of the world, this will facilitate the emergence of a plural racial order where the groups exist in practice but are not official recognized - and anyone trying to address racial division is likely to be chided for racializing the population.

Whether actors express "resentment" or "hostility" toward minorities is largely irrelevant for the maintenance of white privilege.

Contrary to the popular belief that educators across the world have typically been agents for progressive racial change, the weight of the evidence suggests that most educational systems and most educators operate to maintain racial hierarchy rather than to challenge it.

I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.