Quotes About Race

Somehow, someway, for some people there's an automatic assumption that a mayor who is African-American or some other elected official has to support another African-American.

Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.

The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

To some Americans, there was no possible way I could naturally be the daughter of this white American; I had to be from someplace else.

I love being famous. It's almost like being white.

People run away from the love game because they know they won't win the race.

A very different meaning of equality has emerged in the United States in recent decades—equality of outcome. Everyone should have the same level of living or of income, should finish the race at the same time. Equality of outcome is in clear conflict with liberty. The attempt to promote it has been a major source of bigger and bigger government, and of government-imposed restrictions on our liberty.

It just didn't make sense, I kept thinking. Here they worried you to death, made you a nervous wreck, don't do this, don't do that, don't do anything that'd bring shame to the Japanese race, don't be a rotten apple and spoil the whole barrel. What chance have I got, me, a single apple getting slammed by a barrelful of rottenness? Even if I tried deliberately, every day of my life, I wouldn't be able to produce one-thousandth of the massive shame of Pearl Harbor.

Equal rights meant just that, rights for both blacks and women, with the association working for both at the same time. Women should not be told to stand back and wait. [Frederick] Douglas said that women should be generous and allow the Negro to get his vote first. A young woman in the audience replied that she did not think it generous to compel women to yield on all questions ... simply because they are women.

Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.

and the more he looked the less white he seemed, as though looking for his whiteness was the opposite of whiteness, was driving it further away, making him seem desperate

a white man had indeed shot a dark man, but also that the dark man and the white man were the same.

I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point--race. Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything.

I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.

on "knowledge" vs "wisdom"] When you come right down to it, white women just think they free. Black women know they ain't free.

Like so much of cool hunting, Hilfiger's marketing journey feeds off the alienation at the heart of America's race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth.

And there has been no more effective way to convince white voters to support the defunding of schools, bus systems, and welfare than by telling them (however wrongly) that most of the beneficiaries of those services are darker-skinned people, many of them "illegal," out

Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social levelling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival.

Intersectionality, the term coined by black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the only path forward. We cannot play my crisis is more urgent than your crisis—war trumps climate; climate trumps class; class trumps gender; gender trumps race. That trumping game, my friends, is how you end up with a Trump.

The climate science will no longer be denied; what will be denied is the idea that the nations that are the largest historical emitters of carbon owe anything to the black and brown people impacted by that pollution. This will be denied based on the only rationale possible; that those non-white and non-Christian people are lesser than, are the other, are dangerous invaders.

The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her beauty. Her reproductive value, as the aesthetic value of her face and body today, came to be seen as a sacred trust, one that she must constantly guard in the interest of her race.

Lewontin gathered measurements of seventeen different proteins in a wide range of human populations, from the Chippewa to the Zulu, from the Dutch to the people of Easter Island. When he sorted people according to their race, he found that the genetic differences between races accounted for only 6.3 percent of the total genetic diversity in humans. The genetic diversity within populations, such as the Zulu or the Dutch, contained a staggering 85.4 percent.

It is true that humans have physical differences, and some of those differences are spread geographically across the plant. But clinging to old notions about race won't help us understand the nature of those differences—both the ones we can see and the ones we can't.

It is true that humans have physical differences, and some of those differences are spread geographically across the planet. But clinging to old notions about race won't help us understand the nature of those differences—both the ones we can see and the ones we can't.