Quotes About Race

I couldn't ever be more than that in Lansing. Can't ever be more anyplace, it turns out, as long as I wear this brown skin. I used to think things were different, because Papa used to tell me stories about all the great things I could be and could do. But now I understand. Now I know they were just stories. Just ideas in his head.

Women of color have no call to trust white women until white women take a gander at the world around them, investigate, learn and annihilate ignorance founded in being white in a society where the perspective and voice presented to the general public is white.

You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders as you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Irrespective of where they lived, most white Americans before the civil rights era were indifferent to Jim Crow. Yet only in, and surrounding, the former Confederacy did the formal political system utilize race to exclude adults from citizenship and full access to civil society. Private terror combined with public law and enforcement to make this political system authentically totalitarian. Competitive party politics did not exist. Electoral contests were enacted inside the one dominant party.

Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.

Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has a monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin—one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.

For the middle majority of us all, knowledge of Negroes firsthand is probably limited—limited to the colored cleaning woman, who comes twice a week, limited to the colored baseball player who saves or loses a home game, limited to the garage mechanic, or dime-store clerk, or blues singer seen and heard on a Saturday night. To this white majority, the black man is as unknown as once was the heart of the Dark Continent of Africa.

Our own domestic Negro situation is another thing.

Perhaps the Negro musicians had not been able to give enough because they were inhibited by her Southern-supremacy origins.

Critics of Afrocentrism can recognize the facial features in a police sketch as belonging to a Black man, but when these features appear on the face of a Hawaiian monarch, or on that of a pharaoh, the identity of this royalty becomes subject to all manner of esoteric hair splitting

The worst predijudice is unknowing. We think we treat others as equals, but, in our deepest heart, we regard ourselves as superior. In part, this is because we are, in ways, powerful. But that does not make the race of humans (funanga) better than that of the dog or equine.

America is God's crucible, the great melting pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!

You, the Spirit of the Settlement ... Not understand that America is God's crucible, the great melting-pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming Here, you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries...

I'm looking forward to the day when America will mature to the point that we are a color-blind society. I'm not so sure that in politics that will ever be reality, because politics has a way of separating us based on skin color.

I have often said one of the reasons more blacks don't support Republicans is because they don't trust the GOP establishment.

I am willing to compete on my merits and on my character - not with the color of my skin. We talk about being a color-blind society, but I don't think the political process could actually handle that.

You know, you don't have to be white to be president of anything. Even of the United States. I could be president! Black as I am! And if you white and poor, you don't have to be rich to get to be president either.

At the sales counter, the human race's greatest confrontation with existence, there were no yesterdays, no history to be relived, only an intense transactional present.

The biological factors underlying race differences in sports have consequences for educational achievement, crime and sexual behavior.

the big idea of U.S. history: the subjugation of people of color by a succession of social systems, from the genocide of Indigenous people to slavery to mass incarceration.

I think men get nervous when women start counting the number of female senators, and whites become edgy when they hear the next Supreme Court seat will probably go to a Latino. This isn't always because they object to sharing the spoils, by the way; it just reminds us that the melting pot may not be working, and we haven't yet achieved the ambiguous national dream of becoming a nation of indistinguishable beige atheists.

When he drew back she said, 'Don't you mind?' 'Mind what?' he whispered. 'My skin. Don't you mind kissing a coloured girl?

In short, our journalists do not realise that the human race has any respect for coherency of mind. It is not strange that their world has also lost all respect for that other sort of coherency which was called integrity.

The atmosphere seems to change once the sun goes down and the race fans get to watch a good show.