Quotes About Race

In the early American republic, the most significant challenge to the traditional assumption that the worth of human beings depended on their race, class, and gender came from the scriptural teachings that all are equal in the sight of God and all are one in Christ.

Ironically, the Democrats' great insistence on the natural equality of all white men prompted them to make a more glaring exception of non-whites. Taking seriously the motto "all men are created equal," Democrats called into question the very humanity of nonwhites in order to keep them unequal.

I was surrounded by whiteness and hadn't yet learned that I was beautiful in a different way.

no one knew how to take pictures of anyone who wasn't white. So when I went to school, I studied why

Fucking black was fucking exotic. And America loves to fuck exotic. Put black vengeance and white guilt together in the same bed and you had a night to remember!

Making love to a Negro isn't frightening; sleeping with him is. Sleep is complete surrender. It's more than nude; it's naked. Anything can happen during the night, when reason sleeps.

Altijd heb ik die foto van Carole Laure bij me. Een gulzige mond en vochtige ogen (...) Carole Laure in mijn bed. Carole Laure die een heerlijk negermaal voor me bereidt (rijst en kip met kruiden). Carole Laure die naast me zit en met wie ik samen in deze smerige, luizige kamer jazz beluister. Carole Laure als slavin van een neger. Waarom niet? (p.21)

He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. . . 'And when they discover their mistake, I mean, truly discover it, it'll be as big as when they learned the world was, in fact, round. It'll open up a whole new world. And nothing will ever be the same.

I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this "condition" affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.

cultural values or art treasures destroyed forever, are a tragic proof of where discrimination and contempt of human dignity can lead, especially if they are animated by perverse theories on a presumed difference in the value of races or on the division of men into men of "high worth," "worthy of living," and men who are "worthless," "unworthy of living." Before God, all men are of the same value and importance. (Italics added.)

If you asked me to name the three scariest threats facing the human race, I would give the same answer that most people would:nuclear war, global warming and Windows.

The only thing more suspicious than a black man running is a black man tippy-toeing.

I'm black—not African American. That's a term I don't like. I was born in America and I've never been to Africa. It's an absurd term. A term that Jesse Jackson crammed down the throats of the media. It's ridiculous.

Today visionaries have access to the technology to upgrade humanity, and terminate the race in the process. Yesterday's visionaries are today's messiahs and angels of death.

law of Schrödinger's Whites, a brilliant conceit that I am not responsible for, in which Jews are white or non-white depending on the politics of the observer, in this context Krug's Jewishness enhances the story.

being white is not about skin color, but security. It means you are protected because you are a member of the majority culture.

I said earlier that being white was not just about skin color, but about security. That's what white privilege represents. White really means: safe.

Tattnall from 1937 to 1941 shows no white bodies were donated for cadaver use during those five years while fifty-three black corpses were taken. Racial discrimination seemed to have no end, even after death.

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

I don't think the negro problem can be discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

Education is indoctrination if you're white — subjugation if you're black.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear.

God was a clever idea ... The human race came up with a winner there.