Quotes About Race

But Socco, Mustafa Ali said. If there ain't no black people really and they ain't no white people then how come you still usin' them words? Because them words still usin' me, brother Ali. They usin' me like a mothahfuckah.

Why did you need to see my ID?" "This is an exclusive service, Mr. Orlean," she said with no chink of humanity in her face. "And we like to know exactly who it is we're dealing with." "Oh," I said. "So it wasn't because of my clothes or my race?" "The lower races come in all colors, Mr. Orlean. And none of them get back here.

Of course, I always knew that there was no real difference between the races, but still, it was nice to see an example of that equality.

You know, the undersized genius had said, ain't no way in the world that black folks could'a done enough bad to call all them centuries'a pain down on our heads.

Sure can. But you know a white man got to go through sumpin' 'fore he could call a black man friend. White man got to see the shit an' smell it too before he could really know a black friend." Jean-Paul

The problem with people like Antoinette, people who have only partly comprehended that race is no longer the primary defining factor of American life, is that they, her and her kind, unknowingly keep watch over the masters' wealth; and that the power of that wealth maintains all the ignorance of centuries of classism, racism, and the hierarchy that ignorance demands.

I'm a twenty-first-century New Yorker and therefore have little time to contemplate race. It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It's just that I rarely worry about those things because there's a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every moment of every day.

Somewhere along the way I had developed the feeling that I wasn't going to outlive the adventure I was having. There was no way out but to run, and I couldn't run, so I decided to milk all those white people for all the money they'd let go of. Money bought everything. Money paid the rent and fed the kitty. Money was why Coretta was dead and why DeWitt Albright was going to kill me. I got the idea, somehow, that if I got enough money then maybe I could buy my own life back.

there was enough trouble in my trough; I'd save the reeducation of the white race for sometime later in the week.

Most Americans wouldn't understand why two well-dressed men would have to explain why they were standing on a public street. But most Americans cannot comprehend the scrutiny that black people have been under since the days we were dragged here in bondage.

The whites have merely selected a facet of their own culture which is outstanding - namely, the ability to bring together millions in a single political unit - and they have then used this as a universal yardstick for measuring the inherent worth of cultures and races. (The classic example of this cultural egocentricity is the statement that 'the black man never invented the wheel'.)

It must be noted that once a person is said to be black by the white world, then that is usually the most important thing about him; fat or thin, intelligent or stupid, criminal or sportsman - these things pale into insignificance. Actually I've found out that a lot of whites literally cannot tell one black from another.

The essence of white power is that it is exercised over black peoples - whether or not [black peoples] are minority of majority, whether it was a country belonging originally to whites or to blacks. It is exercised in such a way that black people have no share in that power and are, therefore, denied any say in their own destinies.

Violence in the American situation is inescapable. White society is violent, white American society is particularly violent, and white American society is especially violent towards blacks.

I have a dark-skinned pigment and I lease new cars," Chime said. "You can't have dark skin and a new car in Clarkston without harassment.

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.

It is, then, not simply a question of black power or white power, but of how meaningfully to reenfranchise human power. This, as I think Martin Luther King understood, is the real point, the real gift to America, of the struggle of the black people. In accepting the humanity of the black race, the white people will not be giving accommodation to an alien people; it will be receiving into itself half of its own experience, vital and indispensable to it, which it has so far denied at great cost.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: DEAD WHITE MALE

Once the war was over, they reorganized the Democratic Party and announced in their 1865 platform, "We hold this to be a Government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race, and … that people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States, and that there can, in no event, nor under any circumstances, be any equality between white and other races.

for many Northern whites, the struggle with the Klan simply underscored the fact that Reconstruction, for all its initial promise, had turned into a long, violent slog.

Telling the Parkses your father was an African chieftan has the same sound to me as the white man telling me I'm a nigger.

pp. 6-7: I want America to return to the ideal of treating people as individuals, so I have to write a book that treats Americans as groups. But there's no way around it. Those of us who want to defend the American creed have been unwilling to say openly that races have significant group differences. Since we have been unwilling to say that, we have been defenseless against claims that racism is to blame for unequal outcomes. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer candidly.

Page 39: Among people of the four races with IQs of 100, 70 percent are European or Asian. For IQs of 115, 85 percent. For IQs of 125, 90 percent. For IQs of 140, 96 percent.

Page 67: For jobs that require a college degree, race differences in cognitive ability in the workplace should be minimized by the process of obtaining that college degree. But it hasn't worked that way since at least the 1970s. Colleges have been complicit in transmitting the mean IQ differences by race in the general population not only through the college pipeline but through the graduate-education pipeline as well.