Race Relations Quotes

If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this new world, he wouldn't own it now.Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor--if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.

~ Colson Whitehead

The meetings and marches and vigils are cool, but if the enemy isn't present, you're just talking slick to a can of oil.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

I am groping about through this American forest of prejudice and proscription, determined to find some form of civilization where all men will be accepted for what they are worth.

~ P.b.s. Pinchback

There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Sixty millions of whites are in no danger from the presence here of eight millions of blacks. The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law.

~ John Marshall Harlan

The sure guaranty of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, national and state, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States, without regard to race. State enactments regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race, and cunningly devised to defeat legitimate results of the war, under the pretense of recognizing equality of rights, can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned.

~ John Marshall Harlan

Becoming conscious of racism does not mean you are a racist.

~ Auliq Ice

Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become. This perplexing consequence came fully to light as soon as equality was no longer seen in terms of an omnipotent being like God or an unavoidable common destiny like death. Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact in itself, without any gauge by which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hundred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is “normal” if he is like everybody else and “abnormal” if he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become all the more conspicuous.

~ Hannah Arendt

By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew—and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control it. I like to think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away. I like to think this, but I can’t promise it. The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

He seemed to hasten the retreat of departing light by his very presence; the setting sun dipped sharply, as though fleeing before our nigger; a black mist emanated from him; a subtle and dismal influence; a something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil. The circle broke up. The joy of laughter died on stiffened lips.

~ Joseph Conrad

She didn't tell him white folks couldn't love the same as coloreds. She couldn't love the same neither though, cuz more than half of her was white.

~ Shannon Celebi

There are no superior or inferior races. No one is intrinsically inferior or superior. All have the same value as creatures of god. Those who put others down simply want to exploit them.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

To those supremacist racists I ask what color will be their bodies when they turn to dust.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

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

~ Carlos Wallace

There's good in all things. You just have to find it.

~ Carlos Wallace

It speaks volumes when people who are discriminated against go on to discriminate against others.

~ Dashanne Stokes

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

Whites saying 'make America white again' is like millionaires saying 'make the wealthy rich again.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Racism hurts everyone, including racists themselves.

~ Dashanne Stokes

If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.

~ Wendell Berry

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.

~ Jonathan R. Miller

The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us.

~ Chuck D

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

~ Jennifer Lane

You think you're going to impress an American jury with [your] words? In the eyes of the Americans, you're doomed. Just looking at you in an orange suit, chains, and being Muslim and Arabic is enough to convict you.

~ Mohamedou Ould Slahi

I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why'd she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn't she care about the others?Today, I zoomed out and wondered why I'm still in America.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

All we can infer (from the archaeological shards dug up in Berkshire, Devon and Yorkshire) is that the first Britons, whoever they were and however they came, arrived from elsewhere. The land (Britain) was once utterly uninhibited. Then people came.

~ Robert Winder

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

~ Toni Morrison

White supremacy is a black person telling the people of Baltimore to chill out and try peace, thinking they came up with that thought all on their own.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

My heart isn't big enough to care for the oppressors.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Linnie. And this Winnie.” They wore identical smiles, their bright black eyes sparked with curiosity. “Are you the doctor?” “No, I’m just volunteering.” “I knowed that, too.” Winnie gave her an exaggerated shake of the head. “Girls is never the doctor. They’s the nurses.” “Oh no, what about Dr. Clare? Huh? The lady doctor who took care of Grammy in the hospital when she broke her hip bone?” Linnie asked. “Yeah, but she was a white lady. They can be doctors.” Winnie looked at Lucy. “Right? There are white lady doctors. I seen ‘em.” Lucy felt her eyes go wide. Were there children who still believed your gender or color dictated your career? “There are white lady doctors, black lady doctors, white man doctors, black man doctors.” They stared at her. She thought for a moment. “And there are white man nurses and black man nurses, too.” “Now you’re just bein’ silly,” Linnie said and let out a laugh.

~ Mary Jane Hathaway

But in the earlier hours, or so I have read, they still have got their daylight minds. It takes the midnight mind to do the black deed to the black man.

~ Elizabeth Spencer

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

~ W.e.b. Du Bois

Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others—usually the sons of the masters—wish to help him to rise.

~ W.e.b. Du Bois

The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

~ Tim Wise