Quotes About Race

The Irish are a merry race and surely they are mad, for all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad." The

What color am I, Thomas?" "About two shades darker than caramel," answered Thomas. "Damn, Thomas. I'm black. We don't watch golf. We watch football, basketball and dominoes." "I can see you at nighttime, Washington, so you're not black." "Do you see caramel as an option when you fill out the U.S. Census, Thomas?" "No, I don't. But there is a place that states other. Check that one next time.

The history of whiteness in America is one long scroll of affirmative action.

American history hugs colorblindness. If you can't see race you certainly can't see racial responsibility. You can simply remain blind to your own advantages.

Black bodies have been killed and progress has been stalled to provide white comfort.

That is because Donald Trump is the literal face of white innocence without consciousness, white privilege without apology. Each

Maleness has functioned in our race much like whiteness has in the larger culture: its privileges have been rendered normal, its perspectives natural, its biases neutral, its ideas superior, its anger wholly justifiable, and its way of being the gift of God to the universe.

To this day my grandson is worried every time he sees a cop. He fears the cops will try to arrest him and his father. He can't understand why the color of his skin is a reason to be targeted by the police. Mosi is only seven years old.

Whiteness is an advantage and privilege because you have made it so, not because the universe demands it.

Obama had always to field demands from some blacks to be blacker, and the wish of many whites to whitewash the story of American race and politics.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson once argued, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

One of the greatest privileges of whiteness is not to see color, not to see race, and not to pay a price for ignoring it, except, of course, when you're called on it.

White fragility is a will to innocence that serves to bury the violence it sits on top off.

Schools often use Black students in this way in order to achieve racial reckoning on the cheap. They avoid bringing in teachers—or, in other settings, corporations avoid bringing in experts—to address gaps, holes, and areas of ignorance. And the burden for teaching falls on the few Black or Brown folk in the room or office, instead of being assumed by the white folk in those arenas in need of the reflection and change. It is all so utterly exhausting.

A disturbing habit has arisen: ordinary white women, neither empowered by the courts nor sanctioned by social services, demand that Black folk give account of their actions, their presence, or their intentions. Such demands (often captured on a video recording) are made to kids selling lemonade on the street, folk barbecuing in the local park, or a student stealing a few moments of shut-eye in an Ivy League university

It is more difficult to reckon with race if we cannot

Slavery made America a slave to black history. As much as white America invented us, the nation can never be free of us now. America doesn't even exist without us. That's why Barack Obama was so offensive, so scary to white America. America shudders and says to itself: The president's supposed to be us, not them. In that light, Donald Trump's victory was hardly surprising.

Those closer to home have been lashed in the face by a nation that praises white hustle but despises such agency in their darker kin.

The artist in Hansberry saw in the photograph of a black woman being manhandled by white cops all the suffering, all the injustice, all the offense to black life. The brutality was grave enough; the spread of the image transmitted trauma and reinforced the vulnerability of black women and, indeed, the race.

Whites must understand that they benefit from white privilege in order to realize how white privilege creates the space for black oppression.

Black and white people don't merely have different experiences; we seem to occupy different universes, with worldviews that are fatally opposed to one another.

Yes, yes, I know many of you are proud to be Irish, or Italian, or Polish, or Jewish. And those ethnic groups are as real as any other groups with identifiable cultures, languages, and histories. But when your ancestors got to America, they endured a profound makeover. All of your polkas, or pubs, or pizzas, and more got tossed into a crucible of race where European ethnicities got pulverized into whiteness.

The failure to see color only benefits white America. A world without color is a world without racial debt.

We should not be post-racial: seeking to get beyond the uplifting meanings and edifying registers of blackness. Rather, we should be post-racist: moving beyond cultural fascism and vicious narratives of racial privilege and superiority that tear at the fabric of "e pluribus unum.