Quotes About Race

The United States drove itself to civil war because the society valued profits over Black humanity,

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed of most white people in the nation: "They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately, this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.

She'd been noticing the feet of colored people ever since she'd come south. "They've been pressed down to the earth so hard," she said. "And the weight of what they carry tortures their feet.

Government studies show that there are still more than two million race-based housing discrimination crimes every year.8

Du Bois spoke about the relationship of black disenfranchisement to cheap surplus labor in the South; Celia Parker Woolley delineated the relationship between race, women's rights, and labor. Wells-Barnett began her talk by enumerating the 3,284 men, women, and children who had been lynched since Reconstruction, and she illustrated the relationship between lynching and the lack of citizenship rights.

excuses. There was plenty of room for magic in any race, too, for

There was plenty of room for magic in any race, too, for chance and for grit, for tragedy, if an animal went down, for unexpected reversals at the tape. I had always loved all of it—even what couldn't be controlled or predicted.

The animals were like a storm moving whole, and then breaking, every strategy falling away, all caution gone. In the last few furlongs, nothing mattered but legs and length. Dynasty sailed through the final contenders and gained on the favourite, who seemed to stand still for her alone. She ran as if she were flying. As if she were dreaming the win, or winning in someone else's dream. Then her nose was at the tape. The crowd exploded. She'd done it. I

Vesey said there would be the men coming home, towns going up. That's the place for a free nigger, is freighting. That's what the free niggers did in the South, done it for years. White men don't care if you freight or barber. Now I don't want to be a barber. I'd cut somebody's ear off by mistake and they'd lynch me. "Don't make jokes like that," said Britt.

However, the general population had not settled the matter of free black people in their minds yet. All was in flux. Flux: a soldering aid that promotes the fusion of two surfaces, an unstable substance that catches fire.

Britt said, "I closed the deal on Lottie Durgan and we are talking about her grandmother, Elizabeth Fitzgerald. I can get her cheap." "Jesus," said the major. Here was a black man bargaining for the price of a white woman. The world had turned upside down.

Pryor's comedy isn't based on suspiciousness about whites, or on anger, either; he's gone way past that. Whites are unbelievable to him.

The stereotypical images we hold toward groups are powerful in influencing what people see and expect of students. Unless educators consciously try to undermine and work against these kinds of stereotypes, they often act on them unconsciously. Our assumptions related to race are so deeply entrenched that it is virtually impossible for us not to hold them unless we take conscious and deliberate action.

If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture.

A genuinely seismic event in American history, the Birmingham protests cleaved the nation in two, forcing citizens of all backgrounds to take honest measure of the intersection between race and democracy in national life.

The grace factor will be revealed in three areas of your life: grace for the race; grace for the place; and grace for the case.

grace for the race; grace for the place; and grace for the case.

There is hope for all the colored people in this country while one white woman can love one colored man.

Rustin foresaw a terrible chain reaction: black violence, inflamed by militant black leadership, producing a white backlash that would destroy liberalism just when it was poised to produce real change.

White privilege is not an overt act of racism but the simple observation that people of white skin are historically and culturally dominant, and therefore seen as the standard or norm.

Interpretation though the filters of ideology has always been one of our race's curses.

Interpretation through the filters of ideology has always been one of our race's curses.

The possibility was rejected because what we have learned of you so far indicates that your race will come through this time successfully. Edenists especially have the social maturity to face that which follows.

I'm not an Edenist, Ione said. What about me, and all the other Adamists, the majority of our race? Are you going to stand back as we perish and fall into the beyond?