Quotes About Race

This was a man who didn't see it coming . . . he WAS it coming, and without him, white America, you would not look or act or think the way you do.

Science tore the human race to bits. When anarchy hit, people struggled for community. The politicians chose enemies so that they could bind their followers with hate and terror. Community isn't enough when a thousand new ways of life beckon from every circuit and test tube.

A race without curiosity will never explore every possibility

The furious pace of drilling was driven by what was called the "rule of capture," a legal term roughly translated as finders keepers. Oil beneath the earth doesn't conform to the niceties of lease boundaries, and a well drilled beside a competitor's lease might well suck up oil from both. No matter. What you got, you kept. Those who tarried might end up with nothing. Thus, every well was a race.

Nothing is wanted but money, and negros are necessary to make it. —Stephen F. Austin, 1832

It's pretty cool to be able to hang out with the President and have the race-winning car on the South Lawn.

He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon

For Justice beats Outrage when she comes at length to the end of the race.

This is what seems to me the grave, perhaps the gravest, evil of our time. For history is always somewhat false, and by its falsehood always somewhat warps judgment; but history written on the basis of deliberate falsehood and of repeated and prolonged suppression would be another matter altogether. It would not be history at all. Now history is the memory of the race; and a man without memory is no longer a man.

I say the word Anti-Semite is vulgar and pedantic : that I think will be universally admitted. It is also nonsensical. The antagonism to the Jews has nothing to do with any supposed Semitic race which probably does not exist any more than do many other modern hypothetical abstractions, and which, anyhow, does not come into the matter. The Anti-Semite is not a man who hates the modern Arabs or the ancient Carthaginians. He is a man who hates Jews.

Not at all similar are the race of the immortal gods and the race of men who walk upon the earth

He was the loveliest born of the race of mortals, and therefore the gods caught him away to themselves, to be Zeus' wine-pourer, for the sake of his beauty, so he might be among the immortals.

A jury is always a more orthodox body than any defendant brought before it; for blacks it is usually a whiter group, for poor people, a more prosperous group... Another lesson about the justice system: the way the judge charges the jury inevitably pushes them one way or the other, limits their independent judgment.

The laws that took the vote away from blacks—poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications—also often ensured that poor whites would not vote. And the political leaders of the South knew this.

I lay back on my bunk and thought about people I love, and how lucky I was to be white and not poor and just passing briefly through a system which is a permanent hell for so many.

Lying there, interrogated by the governor of Virginia, Brown said: "You had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. . . . You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now, but this question is still to be settled,—this Negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet.

Living in Atlanta those seven tumultuous years, I learned not to trust the Northern stereotype of white Southerners as incorrigible racists. Yankee self-righteousness ignored the depth of race hatred in places like Boston or New York.

Frazier said that the Negro middle class had borrowed its bourgeois style and traditional religion from the white middle class, which was itself intellectually and culturally barren. Black people should look to their own heritage, he said, create their own culture.

In spite of such preconceptions about blackness, in spite of special subordination of blacks in the Americas in the seventeenth century, there is evidence that where whites and blacks found themselves with common problems, common work, common enemy in their master, they behaved toward one another as equals. As one scholar of slavery, Kenneth Stampp, has put it, Negro and white servants of the seventeenth century were "remarkably unconcerned about the visible physical differences.

Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races? The United States' armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old.

TEACHER:: Now children, you don't think white people are any better than you because they have straight hair and white faces? STUDENTS:: No, sir. TEACHER:: No, they are no better, but they are different, they possess great power, they formed this great government, they control this vast country. . . . Now what makes them different from you? STUDENTS:: Money! TEACHER:: Yes, but what enabled them to obtain it? How did they get money? STUDENTS:: Got it off us, stole it off we all!

It was the potential combination of poor whites and blacks that caused the most fear among the wealthy white planters.

You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.

the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with