Race And Racism In America Quotes

America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.

The issue, perhaps, boils down to one of how perceptions or misperceptions of racial difference impact various individuals’, or groups of individuals’, experience of freedom in America. Some would argue that it goes beyond hampering their 'pursuit of happiness' to outright obliterating it.

Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart.

The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else’s children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose.

It's not the fact that some people disagree with the protests. That is as much a right as the protests themselves. It is the hateful, profane, condescending way some have expressed their discontent that baffles me. How do you criticize actions you've deemed disrespectful and divisive and an affront to civilized behavior with rhetoric to the same end? That's like the devil judging the Grim Reaper for harvesting souls.

Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945 - well into the childhoods of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age. The clock must be reset.

Discrimination is discrimination, even when people claim it's 'tradition.

Bigotry lives not just in our words, but in our actions, thoughts, and institutions.

Divided we are as people but if we stand together and fight we as a race will unite.

Calling for an end to hate shouldn't be treated as a punishable offense.

It's a scary world we live in when a person of color endorses a racist for president.

Racism hurts everyone, including racists themselves.

Building bridges takes us further than building walls.

Bigotry is based on deception, of oneself and of others.

Urging an organization to be inclusive is not an attack. It's progress.

Political correctness’ is a label the privileged often use to distract from their privilege and hate.

I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us—Christians, Muslims, atheists—lived in this fear of this truth.

It's because of my grandfather that I became a Young Avenger. But it's hard sometimes, to be a black kid carrying a name like "Patriot". I remember talking to Captain America about before he died, and he explained what Patriotism meant to him...It wasn't about blindly supporting your government. It was about knowing what your country could be, what it should be... And trying to lead it there through your example. And holding it accountable when it failed. I remember he said: "There's noting patriotic about corruption or cover-ups... or defending them. But exposing them, well, that takes a hero.

In my quest to find Green Cottenham, I also discovered an unsettling truth that when white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our "fault". But it is undeniably our inheritance.

What matter most is to complete the journey.

Why does God ask traumatized people to look at the trauma they initiated through their sin and rebellion? For the same reason God asks us to: it is the truth, and we are free only when we lift up the truth.

Millions of tears have fallen for black sons, brothers, lovers, and friends whose assailants took or maimed their lives and then simply went on their way.

Discrimination does not 'make America great.' It makes America weak.

Tolstoy was a Caucasian, Gandhi was an Asian, and Martin Luther King Jr. was a Negro, yet all of their hearts were inspired by the one idea of nonviolent resistance. King received it from Gandhi, Gandhi received it from Tolstoy, and Tolstoy received it from Christ.

Bigots often like to say they're the ones being hurt as they oppress and hurt others. Never fall for the 'pity the privileged' routine.

At Snortin' Reformatory, a notorious Washington, D.C. jail located in the northern Virginia suburbs, The Afro-Anarchists were being thrown into a cell. It was a situation that the three of them, like many young black males in the D.C. area, had long ago come to expect as a rite of passage. As the door slammed shut behind them, Bucktooth spoke. "Man, Phosphate, they didn't read us our rights or nothin'." "Yeah, Phos,” Fontaine chimed in, "I didn't think they had to beat us, neither. And whoever heard of being charged with singing too loud and off-key in a public establishment? I don't believe there is no kind of law for that shit.

If origin defines race, then we are all Africans – we are all black.

It's no longer time to take sides for or against race, rather sides against those who still do.

If you'd combat bigotry, use honest language and call things out for what they really are.

In the white newspapers, they use it against us. They make the Panthers look like we all just want to rip the throats out of some white folks for no good reason. We have good reasons, but we still don't want to do that.

If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys.

That's what a man is supposed to do for his wife. Listen, if a nigger didn't get lynched every now and then, well, there's just no telling what they'd do to us.""Who?" Lily asked."Why, honey, the niggers and our husbands both. I don't care what color they are; men build up steam. And they gotta let it out somewhere. Colored men. White men. They both crazy. Honey, the point is you gotta look at it this way: A whole lotta women can't, "I got a man who'll kill for me."

No one in the world -- in the entire world -- know more -- knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here -- and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other.

Racist legacy laws and modern racist practices are all part of the same system, and it needs to be changed now.

It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor for the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice. They both act as reciprocal cause and effect, and a change in neither alone will bring the desired effect. Both must change, or neither can improve to any great extent."(p.88)...."Only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the color-line in this critical period of the Republic shall justice and right triumph,

Issues can only be resolved if each person accepts accountability in the problem.

We must tell the world that even though we elected a bigot, bigotry will not prevail.

When you've grown up mis-educated, surrounded by fear and hate, unaware of your privilege, lies can sound like the truth.

It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really know; but white people also said it, in fact had said it first and said it still. It was when John was five years old and in the first grade that he was first noticed; and since he was noticed by an eye altogether alien and impersonal, he began to perceive, in wild uneasiness, his individual existence.

Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.

Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.

The minute we look away, the minute we stop fighting back, that's the minute bigotry wins.

I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.

Never be content to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon. Your rights could be next.

If not as a true human, let me tell you as a Biologist, color of the skin does not define an individual’s intelligence – it does not define an individual’s ambitions - it does not define an individual’s dreams – and above all, it does not define an individual’s character.

An institution rooted in slavery cannot be the voice of our people.

Only God can break through the variegated walls of skin to capture the one and only hue of the heart. One Blood.

In all his imaginings, he had never envisioned her crying. He knew that her son had died, but he'd never expected that her pain might be anything he could recognize, almost as though he believed that Negroes had their own special kind of grieving ritual, another language, something other than tears they used to express their sadness.

Racism is dead only to those who've closed their eyes and ears to the whole world around them.

Black, white, Latino, gay, straight – if any one of them came across a bear in the woods, they’d all taste like chicken.

Sentiments that glorify humanity know no racial distinction.

...all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me...

It is character that should be the sole measure of judgement in the society of thinking humanity, and nothing short of that would do.

Electing a bigot enables further bigotry.

If you see a group of people struggling over generations and you attribute those struggles to bad character, then you do not truly believe we are all created equally.

If you can't see past my name, you can't see me.

Standing against discrimination for some while supporting discrimination against others hurts us all.

In this town, white politicians and black ministers seemed to go together like tears and tissues. At election time, the pols got religion and came looking for the blessings of black ministers as a way to get black votes without providing the kinds of services to black communities that they at least promised to East Boston and Charlestown and the other mostly white Boston neighborhoods.

When one attains self-knowledge, distinctions of race and religion vanish.

It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.