Race In America Quotes

To be an American is to be accosted by bigotry and enmity for the rights that you were told to appreciate.

~ Tennessee West

Electing a bigot enables further bigotry.

~ Dashanne Stokes

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

People of color are allowed, even required to perform, and, especially these days on issues of race, to edify as well. 'Here you are, now entertain us'. But are we allowed to lead?

~ Jeff Chang

None of us get to choose our race but we all get to choose how we overcome its hurtles. Whether we jump or stumble...what matters most is that we take each moment in stride. Compassion, love, forgiveness and empathy will always win the human race.

~ Jason Versey

Richard Wright and his Negro intellectual colleagues never realized the plain truth that no one in the United States understood the revolutionary potential of the Negro better than the Negro's white radical allies. They understood it instinctively, and revolutionary theory had little to do with it. What Wright could not see was that what the Negro's allies feared most of all was that this sleeping, dream-walking black giant might wake up and direct the revolution all by himself, relegating his white allies to a humiliating second-class status. The negro's allies were not about to tell the Negro anything that might place him on the path to greater power and independence in the revolutionary movement than they themselves had. The rules of the power game meant that unless the American Negro taught himself the profound implications of his own revolutionary significance in America, it would never be taught to him by anybody else. Unless the Negro intellectuals understood that in pursuit of this self-understanding, they would have to make their own rules, by and for themselves, nationalism would forever remain--as it was for Wright-- a bewildering and vexing question.

~ Harold Cruse

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

Foisting an identity on people rather than allowing them the freedom and space to create their own is shady.

~ Raquel Cepeda

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

Racism hurts everyone, including racists themselves.

~ Dashanne Stokes

What if racism is so perfect, it made you believe the boycotting and peaceful protests of the civil rights movement actually changed policies, but in actuality policies were gonna change anyway.Hell, let them sit whereever they want on the bus. Just don't sit with them. Let them into our schools, the teachers will still teach from a eurocentric curriculum anyway. Let them eat with us, they'll need the energy and strength to build our homes.Racism is a perfect system with an impenetrable barrier.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow s hall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure, -- is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?

~ W.e.b. Du Bois

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.

~ Pew Research Center

I guess I'd rather have a truthful neighbor who says he hates me than a lyin' one who claims he loves me.

~ David Hopper

Yessir, some things is sin 'cause God says so. Some things is sin 'cause they hurt other people. And some things is just pure-dee stupid.

~ David Hopper

You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy.Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

~ Brian Spellman

I tried to get away from him, to get to that door, but instead I backed up against the wall and was stuck there in that white, white room.

~ Louise Erdrich

Perhaps finding out that we carry New World history in our genes will transcend racial checkboxes altogether and enable Latino-Americans to rethink what America is supposed to look like.

~ Raquel Cepeda