Quotes About Race

A lot of our outlawed terms were invented by black people and then picked up by whites, who held on to them way past their expiration date. "My bad," for example, and "I've got your back" and "You go, girlfriend." They're the verbal equivalents of sitcom grandmothers high-fiving one another, and on hearing them, I wince and feel ashamed of my entire race.

In America, the talk now is all about white privilege, but regardless of your race, there's American privilege as well, or at least Western privilege. It means that when you're in Dakar or Minsk your embassy is open and staffed, and you don't need to hand out bribes in order to get

Well the nation may forget; it may shut its eyes to the past, but the colored people of this country are bound to keep fresh a memory of the past till justice shall be done them in the present."39

In the 1880s, though, Douglass's fame still had to be couched in the racialized claim that he represented "the one, and apparently only one, exception to the general laziness and ignorance of the black population in the midst of which he was born.

Douglass wrote, "Not a Negro Problem, not a race problem, but a national problem; whether the American people will ultimately administer equal justice to all the varieties of the human race in this Republic.

Too many whites, he said, were "haunted with the idea, that to invest the colored race with equal rights is dangerous to the rights of white men." Such a "mischievous heresy" had for far too long paralyzed history.

Maybe when all was said and done, the imagination was the most powerful of all weapons. It was the imagination of the human race that had allowed it to dream of a life beyond cold caves and of a possible future in the stars.

Pure, hard-core liberals believe in a superior race. They think they're it. They believe they're more intelligent than the general run of mankind, better suited than the little people are to manage the little people's lives. They think they have the one true vision, the ability to solve all the moral dilemmas of the century. They prefer big government because that is the first step to totalitarianism, toward unquestioned rule by the elite. And of course they see themselves as the elite.

I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, "Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing—loads of Indian people." To which you want to reply, "Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing—loads of white people.

He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is "color-blind," by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color—to look past it—to the "you" beneath. Not content with colonizing your country, he now colonizes your self

But like all things, the business has two sides. Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they? Par exemplum: when I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery, it was. And they died because of it, you see? Poor bastards. Or rather I survived, to look at it in another way, do you see?

Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And

He is a black man. He is often thought of as a nothing, a cipher. But he has layers upon layers upon layers.

A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.

because white novelists are not white novelists but simply "novelists," and white characters are not white characters but simply "human," and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the neutral universal, and the black women who have championed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the past, and the one doing so now, will seem like black women talking about a black book.

Racial homogeneity is no guarantor of peace, any more than racial heterogeneity is fated to fail.

When I showed her my well-worn copy of Stormy Weather she reacted in a way I hadn't anticipated, she was offended by it—hurt, even. Why was everybody black? It was unkind, she said, to have only black people in a film, it wasn't fair. Maybe in America you could do that, but not here, in England, where everybody was equal anyway and there was no need to "go on about it." And

He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is "color-blind," by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color—to look past it—to the "you" beneath.

Hey! 'Hey!' But there was no name to put on the end of Hey and a six foot two black man shouting Hey in a dense crowd does not create easiness wherever he goes.

He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is "color-blind," by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color—to look past it—to the "you" beneath. Not content with colonizing your country, he now colonizes your self. So

Harry surely hadn't meant to tell his only son that you couldn't accept black people to develop mentally like white people do. He had meant to say : I love you, I love my grandchildren, please stay another day.

Ne?manoma prad?ti racionalaus dialogo su žmogumi apie tik?jimus ir s?vokas, jeigu jis j? ne?gijo protu. Ir nesvarbu, apie k? mes kalbame: apie Diev?, ras? ar pasididžiavim? savo t?vyne

American should read the signs of the times, realize the crisis, and meet it in an American way. Otherwise we are done as a race. Money is God in the older countries. But it should never become God in America. If it does we will make the fall of Rome pale into insignificance.

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again. How It Feels to Be Colored Me