Quotes About Race

Why is it that white people find it easier to think like a mountain than like a person of colour?' Carl Anthony quoted by Rebecca Solnit

I find now that most people forget the immense work done around race and gender and sexuality and prisons and power, and that it was, in fact, work—intellectual labor to reject the assumptions built into language, the forces that lift some of us up and push others down, to understand and describe the past and the present and propose new possibilities for the future.

Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all.

Ils étaient onze, deux Noirs, deux Jaunes, quatre Blancs, et trois allant du café au lait à l'huile d'olive. Mais leurs onze sangs mêlés dans une coupe n'eussent fait qu'un seul sang rouge.

f white Americans were to leave the country tomorrow, in ten years -America would be a ghetto. You can see the truth of this when you look at many of our major cities that are run by black mayors, black-dominated city councils, and black police chiefs. These cities are usually horrible places to live. Yet blacks who live in black-ruled cities can't see the truth: their own immorality is the cause of black poverty, crime, and family destruction!

I can say with confidence that many black males are both lazy and irresponsible. This view isn't popular with problem profiteers who

Rhodes, founder of the De Beers diamond company and at one time the virtual dictator of modern-day South Africa, famously declared, "We Britons are the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race." Among

Racing through the ocher light, Bigwig was impelled by a frenzy of tension and energy. He did not feel the wound in his shoulder. The storm was his own. The storm would defeat Efrafa.

White people were similarly invented. Europeans coming to America boarded ships as Germans, Poles, English, French, and so on. They soon learned that in America they had a new privileged identity based on something they had scarcely considered before: the pale color of their skins.

Mississippi is the center of the universe," he said. "The two biggest issues in western Christian civilization are the white-black race issue and the rich-and-poor issue. Mississippi is at the apex of both. And if anybody in the world can solve the problem, it's Mississippi.

Whatever race might be, it is certainly not logical or scientific.

White and black citizens are bound together in the most fundamental way possible—at the level of the genome," he writes, and yet divided by the racial pseudoscience originally devised to justify slavery and perpetuated in slightly shifting forms ever since.

Under the pressure of opinion of this weight, applied without let-up during the crucial years of the Fisher-Tirpitz battleship race, it is understandable that arithmetic won the day in Britain, and sight was sometimes lost of the less exciting factors that contributed vitally to a battle fleet's efficiency and fighting power.

How large is the black-white difference? The usual answer to this question is one standard deviation. In discussing IQ tests, for example, the black mean is commonly given as 85, the white mean as 100, and the standard deviation as 15.

The authors] have been cast as racists and elitists and The Bell Curve has been dismissed as pseudoscience . . . . The book's message cannot be dismissed so easily.

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

White Americans cannot deny their long history of abusive transactions with people of color. These offenses, it should be noted out of fairness, can be explained in part by the fact that no other sizable national state has ever been formed from the confluence of so many diverse ethnic streams. All our heterogeneous ferment no doubt made contentiousness inevitable.

It is time for South Carolina to rejoin the Union. It is time to fall in step with the other states and to adopt the American way of conducting elections.… Racial distinctions cannot exist in the machinery that selects the officers and lawmakers of the United States.

That act, on December 7, 1787, is perhaps Delaware's sole claim to distinction as a champion of democracy. Certainly it was long hostile to the Negro, probably longer and more defiantly so than any other state outside of the Confederacy.

He greeted the group by turning to Freeman. "We're trying to cut down on the racial imbalance in this movie," he said with a small smile. Freeman responded in kind. "Spread the ethnicity around," he said. He too was smiling, though his eyes were quite serious.

This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.

B. A. Botkin's Lay My Burden Down and the Federal Writers' Project book, The Negro in Virginia.

Leigh was constantly amazed when rich white people assumed the system always worked until they found themselves wrapped up in it. Then, it had to be some kind of God damned conspiracy.

There was one lone Caucasian in the bunch. With her hemp sandals, batik dress and the long, gray ponytail hanging down her back, she radiated white guilt like a cheap space heater.