Quotes About Race

I was concious of Zach's breathing, his shirt pulled across his chest, one arm draped on the steering wheel. The hard, dark look of it. The mystery of his skin. It was foolish to think some things were beyond happening, even being attracted to Negroes. I'd honestly thought such a thing couldn't happen, the way water could nog run uphill or salt could not taste sweet. A law of nature.

It washed over me for the first time in my life how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets. Ever since school let out this summer, it had been nothing but skin pigment every livelong day. I was sick of it.

It washed over me for the first time in my life how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets. Ever since school let out this summer, it had been nothing but skin pigment every livelong day. I was sick of i.

it washed over me for the first time in my life just how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets.

Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it's not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.

Mauma didn't fall again, though, and I reckoned God had lent me an ear, but maybe that ear wasn't white, maybe the world had a colored God, too, or else it was mauma who kept her own self standing, who answered my prayer with the strength of her limbs and the grip of her heart. She never whimpered, never made a sound except some whisperings from her lips.

I knew a free black there who had a room, and he took her in. She said when the Guard stopped searching for her, she'd go back to the Grimkés and throw herself on their mercy." He'd been pacing, but now he sat down next to me and finished up the truth quick as he could. "One night she went out to the privy in Radcliff Alley and there was a white man there, a slave poacher named Robert Martin. He was waiting for her.

that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it's not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.

You speak as if God was white and Southern! As if we somehow owned his image. You speak like a fool. The Negro is not some other kind of creature than we are. Whiteness is not sacred, Mary! It can't go on defining everything.

Let the games begin!

No race on earth is as clever at being strangers as the British. They wrap themselves in formality, they withdraw behind veil after veil of exquisite politeness, they hide cunningly behind a bewildering array of carefully chosen façades—

In principle, it was easy to support the civil rights movement in Mississippi or Washington or on the streets of Detroit. Of course, it was right. But feeling- now, there's a war zone full of land mines which could blow to smithereens any right-thinking individual. And that of course is the territory of race.

Susan Sontag Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57. Also What's Happening in America (1966) The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history

protested that a big majority of Black men were drafted compared to whites. It seemed wrong that men who were still struggling for equality at home were being shipped overseas for a cause most people didn't even understand.

They were Englishmen and, to them, the decline of other nations was the most natural thing in the world. They belonged to a race blessed with so sensitive an appreciation of its own talents (and so doubtful an opinion of anybody else's) that they would not have been at all surprised to learn that the Venetians themselves had been entirely ignorant of the merits of their own city - until Englishmen had come to tell them it was delightful.

The battle rages eternal, though the race, religion, gender or sexual orientation of those discriminated against changes regularly. Maybe man's need for a scapegoat is genetically programmed into him.

Well-spoken white people from prominent families came out on top in our broken court system. It wasn't fair, but it was true.

There was no such thing as mixed-race in the South, or in America for that matter. The whole country had called a mixed-race man our "first black president.

In 1850, Dr. Samuel Cartwright reported in The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal the discovery of a new disease, which he called drapetomania. Drapetomania was a condition that caused sulkiness, dissatisfaction, and a desire to avoid service. It was used to describe slaves who sought to run away from their servitude: drapetes, the ancient Greek word for "runaway slave," and mania for "excessive energy or activity.

Perhaps the human race had yet to be born. Perhaps it was all a deception by the government. It hadn't happened yet. This life was nothing but the womb.

In 1940 the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks was 19 percent. Today it is close to 70 percent.

the Democratic Party, and decades of Democratic control of Congress, the schools have continued to fail minority children? Big-city schools have become increasingly segregated by race and class in the last thirty years. Their academic performance has declined. In addition, the black middle class has joined whites in moving out to the suburbs to get their children away from those schools.

England is an empire, Germany is a nation, a race, France is a person.

Some people have a great fashion of calling things they do not like yellow. You exclude the yellow man. You fear the yellow peril. I edit a white paper turned out by yellow men, and many white men turn out yellow papers.