Quotes About Race

racial violence only becomes more vicious in its expression. It will not abate or disappear, not anytime soon

Wainwright was pale-skinned, but all the black boys knew from his hair and nose that he had some Negro blood. He beat the black boys for knowing what he pretended not to know about himself.

My part is finished, my friends." He embraced the runaways with desperate affection. Cora couldn't help but shrink away. Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom?

South Carolina has a much more enlightened attitude toward colored advancement than the rest of the south.

He was all of them in one black body that night in the ring, and he was all of them when the white men took him out back to those two iron rings.

And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers

Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties, he said.

He'd broken through into a small corner of American success where his race did not curse him. Some might have lived in that space happily, rising alone. Lander wanted to make room for others. People were wonderful company sometimes.

The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race – which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for ourselves and our children? "For

The patroller required no reason to stop a person apart from color.

Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door. The GI Bill fixed things pretty good for the white boys he served with, but the uniform meant different things depending who wore it. What was the point of a no-interest loan when a white bank won't let you step inside?

When black blood was money, the savvy businessman knew to open the vein.

Cora had become too accustomed to escaping unscathed from encounters with white authority.

True, you couldn't treat an Irishman like an African, white nigger or no.

The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood.

When she got older, she described herself as a student of American history, attuned to the inevitable. She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.

Black hands built the White House

I prefer the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine

The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be. Cora

The white people do not see colored people, even in broad daylight, in the middle of town.

According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were.

It's not so different up there, Lila Mae. They have the same white people up there they got down here. It might look different. It might feel different. But it's the same.

There was no hope for him as a colored man because the white world will not let a colored man rise, and there was no hope for him as a white man because it was a lie.

Let one colored in and you're integrated. Let two in, you got a race war as they try to kiss up to whitey.