Quotes About Race

If you kill a black man, the world is silent. You can hear a garage door opening from twenty blocks away. You can pick up a pay phone and only hear the dial tone. Shooting stars sound exactly like the soft laughter of a little girl in Gasworks Park. If you kill a white man, the world erupts with noise: fireworks, sirens, a gavel pounding a desk, the slamming of doors.

If God really loved Indians, he would have made us white people.

They call me an apple because they think I'm red on the outside and white on the inside.

Mostly, I just think Mr. P is a lonely old man who used to be a lonely young man. And for some reason I don't understand, lonely white people love to hang around lonelier Indians.

We shuffled past white customers who stared at us with hate, pity, disgust, and anger—the Four Horsemen of the Anti-Indian Apocalypse.

On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing. It's because white men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how. That's how assimilation can work.

I was successful and acceptable and loved because I was—and still am—great at negotiating with whiteness. But that means my white friends often mistakenly believe that my ability to successfully negotiate the white world means that I am white—or more white than Native. My white friends can mistakenly believe that my intellectual and artistic abilities are intrinsically white.

He was a white man and, therefore, he was allowed to be romantic.

But it happens mostly because "being American" means "being white," even for a brown boy like me.

Paul believed American greatness and the ghosts of that greatness surrounded him. But who could publicly express such a belief and not be ridiculed as a patriotic fool? Paul believed in his fellow Americans, in their extraordinary decency, in their awesome ability to transcend religion, race, and class, but what leftist could state such things and ever hope to get laid by any other lefty?

Nothing as white as the white girl an Indian boy loves.

She was so white his reservation eyes suffered.

Lynn's parents refused to accept Sean Casey's Indian blood and, in fact, exhibited a kind of denial that was nearly pathological in its intensity.

I guess the subject of race is so natural to me I never think of it as hefty. It's something I talk about and joke about and discuss with my loved ones every day of my life.

There's no such thing as perfection, and life is not a race.

If whites bored me, it was because they bored themselves. They seemed to get little fun out of life and were desperately lonely.

All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it's impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn't left an imprint through the generations.

Life is a race. If you delay starting, how can you have any hope of winning?

It is now true that this is God's Country, if equal rights-a fair start and an equal chance in the race of life are everywhere secured to all.

I'm a skydiver, I race motorcycles and I enjoy the thrill of life and for me in this walk of faith there really is no greater thrill than the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in your life.

In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it's as if they don't exist.

Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.

I have been painting white people for much longer in my life than I have done for colored people.

You have to talk about the issue of race, but I can talk to white constituents about racism, if I at least acknowledge that life is not a crystal stair for them either.