Quotes About Race

Man has naturally and universally a capacity for religion—and not only a capacity, for the vast majority of the human race practices or professes some form of religion.

Time is running out. The seconds are ticking away toward midnight. The human race is about to take the fatal plunge . . . Is there any authority left? Is there a path we can follow? Can we find a code book that will give us the key to our dilemmas? We do have authoritative source material. It is found in the ancient and historic Book we call the Bible.

There is only one possible solution to the race problem and that is a vital personal experience with Jesus Christ on the part of [all] races.

No personality in history stands above Jesus Christ . . .He alone is able to meet every need of the human race.

The [Bible's] message is concerned with earth dwellers, their origin, the reason for their existence, the cause of their misery, and the plan of redemption for a fallen race.

My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child, But I am black as if bereaved of light.

Dating across the color line was just another way of bucking convention. But since my father neither looked nor identified as black, there wasn't much risk of public censure. The women could be daring and modern without being truly radical.

P.B.S. Pinchback, a black politician originally from Mississippi and a supporter of Governor Warmoth's, put it more bluntly: "It is wholesale falsehood to say that we wish to force ourselves upon white people." In his view blacks "could get no rights the whites did not see fit to give them." But the colored Creoles couldn't reconcile this attitude with their urgent desire "to be respected and treated

Pinchback later explained himself: "I have learned to look at things as they are and not as I would have them....This country, at least so far as the South is concerned, is a white man's country....What I wish to impress upon my people, is that no change is likely to take place in our day and in general that will reverse this order of things.

The close election results demonstrated the ability of black voters to decide a race when whites were divided.

But in that lightning moment that exposed the country's deep racial divide, there was something about O.J.'s going free that, to my surprise, made me inexplicably happy.

It's more in line with the warnings they put on plastic laundry covers: Don't wrap this around your head: could be bad for you. I think Darwinism has to get a chance to work. The more we protect stupid people from themselves, the more we ensure the long, slow descent of the human race into idiocracy.

If we're to be successful fighting oppression—whether based on race, class, species, or gender identity—we're going to need to fight the heart of the economic order that drives these oppressions.We're going to have to fight capitalism.

I begin to realize that the physical repetition can be a kind of meditation that transcends the simple goal of winning a race.

In America, the pool is a privilege. People have historically had complicated feelings about water. Mixing in it deliberately—as men and women, as rich and poor, as black and brown and white—can stir up all kinds of fears. As a society, we've kept different groups apart based on those fears.

Though class lines had been erased at the pool, race lines hardened even further, resulting in riots and racial segregation.

Black children drown at a rate five times that of white children. And as with so many other things, money also has a heavy hand in the way swimmers are made: in the United States, nearly 80 percent of children in families with a household income of less than fifty thousand dollars have no or low swimming ability.

No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well.

The wisest among my race understand that agitations of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.

I knew that, in a large degree, we were trying an experiment--that of testing whether or not it was possible for Negroes to build up and control the affairs of a large education institution. I knew that if we failed it wold injure the whole race.

The white man who begins by cheating a Negro usually ends by cheating a white man. The white man who begins to break the law by lynching a Negro soon yields to the temptation to lynch a white man.

In a word, the Negro youth starts out with the presumption against him.