Quotes About Race

I grew up in a mixed-race family in Bristol. My cousin was this white guy who was interested in Parliament, Marc Bolan, Bowie. His friends were football thugs and while I was getting ready for bed, they'd be listening to all that music. When I was older, I'd go to a Jamaican sound system and there were no white people.

Thus the races, though alike in their physical response to climate, may possibly be different in their mental response because they have approached America by different paths.

I am a black American, I say, and thus announce my atavistic connection to all others who live as black Americans, to all who ever lived as black Americans. Religion, caste, class, gender and race can all be atavisms, and they are inherently anti-democratic because they exclude all outside the atavism.

Perhaps we shall also have to hold in check other coloured peoples who will soon be in their certain prime, and thus preserve the world, which is the world of our blood, of our children and of our grandchildren.

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism, based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.

And it is to rock the soul and lead the person to immorality, corruption - to forget their prayers, to forget their God. And thus the world has partaken of the spirit of the Negro race, accepting their ways.

There's no white comic that sells tickets to black people like me. They're going to get their hair done, get a new outfit, and come out to see a white dude.

You get into such a routine of trying so hard each day and racing between 180 and 220 km., and as soon as you stop, it's weird, but you start to seize up. So it's easier if you keep the body ticking over. You just feel better for it come race day.

Democracy presumes that we're all created equal; competition proves we are not, or else every race would end in a tie.

I'm very fortunate. I loved school and, when I went there, race, gangs and violence were not issues. There was a feeling, gone now, that you had to be presentable. If you hadn't combed your hair, older black ladies - complete strangers - would come up to you in the street and pull out a comb and straighten your tie.

Tiger had the advantage of high school, college, and a father who knew golf. I was self-taught. Blacks really won't play golf in great numbers until some of these basketball and football stars buy some golf courses where blacks can play.

When Ozzie Virgil became the first Dominican player in the majors, his nationality was barely noticed. What the press and fans talked about was his skin color. He was the first black player on the Detroit Tigers, and a great deal of attention was paid to him as someone who crossed the color line.

It is truly not fun to be the family that sticks out in an all-white community. On the other side, I have five brothers and sisters; we all look exactly the same, and we're very, very tight. The lessons about race were not pleasant, but there are things that I loved about my childhood.

People might call me the white man, but no one treated me as one.

Our time for this life is nothing other than a race to death.

It took me a minute to figure out that Colored didn't mean red and blue toilets. In Remus, nobody was scared to use the same john as a black man. I knew from experience: white shit doesn't look any different from colored. Remus

certain kind of good fortune generally attends self-made men to the last. It is their children of the first, or first and second, generation who are in greater danger, for the race can no more repeat its most successful performances suddenly and without its ebbings and flowings of success than the individual can do so, and the more brilliant the success in any one generation, the greater as a general rule the subsequent exhaustion until time has been allowed for recovery.

Luxury, so far as it reaches the people, will do good to the race of people; it will strengthen and multiply them. Sir, no nation was ever hurt by luxury; for, as I said before; it can reach but a very few.

Americans are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.

I voted for Barack because he was black. 'Cuz that's why other folks vote for other people - because they look like them... That's American politics, pure and simple.

We Americans" face a substantive problem of national identity epitomized by the subject of this sentence. Are we a "we," one people or several? If we are a "we," what distinguishes us from the "thems" who are not us? Race, religion, ethnicity, values, culture, wealth, politics, or what?

Very. It was supposed to be a white kid on the roof and a nigger that got shot. So they started a riot.

Poor little Foal of an oppressed race! I love the languid patience of thy face.

Doors and windows opened along the street, and women poured out, appearing on apartment balconies and porches and spilling onto the sidewalk singing. It was now revealed that this was a Hispanic neighborhood. For a moment, Ruth thought she was the only white person and felt a shameful jolt of racial paranoia.