Race Quotes

Race doesn't make a man, his mental programming determines his personality.

~ Hafiz

Race doesn't determine the quality of one's heart, one's mental programming does.

~ Hafiz

No matter your race, level of education, gender, age, religion, cultural beliefs, physical appearance, social status, financial status and more, always remember that you are as important as everyone else.

~ Hafiz

I guess it all depends on whom you ask and when you ask. Race, I've learned, is in the eye of the beholder.

~ Raquel Cepeda

To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think.

~ Frantz Fanon

...being Latino means being from everywhere, and that is exactly what America is supposed to be about.

~ Raquel Cepeda

When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.

~ Danzy Senna

Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black culture while still living in the white community. You will face more hate and ridicule and ostracism than you can even begin to fathom. People are willing to accept you if they see you as an outsider trying to assimilate into their world. But when they see you as a fellow tribe member attempting to disavow the tribe, that is something they will never forgive. That is what happened to me in Eden Park.

~ Trevor Noah

I saw her note the way I hovered over the various ethnicities on the form. First the 'white' box, then to the airspace over the 'black' box, a kind of momentary hesitation, a protest of stillness, a staring into the abyss of everything I did not know about myself. She, like me, was made of halves.

~ Olivia Sudjic

What matters most is not 'what' you are, but 'who' you are.

~ Dashanne Stokes

He felt that race was not a characteristic that was a part of his identity, but one that was projected upon him by the gaze of others who looked on him; as such it was ephemeral, there and gone as soon as the gaze was broken.

~ Dexter Palmer

What does it mean when I say that 'I don't see race?' It means that because I learned to see no difference between 'white' and 'color,' I have white-washed my own sense of self. It means that I know more about what it is to be a white person than what it is to be Asian, and I am a stranger among both.

~ Michi Trota

Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?

~ Roberto Bolaño

I'm American. Why didn't I say I was African American? Because I'm in a foreign country? But can I really consider myself to be in a foreign country when I could go walking back to my own country right now if I wanted, and it wouldn't even take very long? Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?

~ Roberto Bolaño

The idea of reappropriation isn’t a new one. The process of turning negative words, symbols, or ideas into positive parts of our own identity – was used for social justice movements long before hipsters thought that being ironic was cool. Whether it is repurposing a racial epithet or taking on a stereotype for sociopolitical empowerment, it’s an important process that has been around for thousands of years and continues to change society today.

~ Simon S. Tam

I don’t subscribe to the notion of seeing no color, that we’re all the same and race doesn’t exist. It’s a social and political reality that we live in. The problem when people say we should concentrate on similarities is that they’re ignoring glaring parts of our humanness—our skin, perhaps the color of our hair, the way we speak, or even the shape of our eyes.

~ Simon S. Tam

The concept of reconciliation is not irretrievable, but I am convinced that before we theologians can interpret the depths of the divine action of reconciliation we must first articulate the profound deformities of Christian intimacy and identity in modernity. Until we do, all theological discussions of reconciliation will be exactly what they tend to be: (a) ideological tools for facilitating negotiations of power; or (b) socially exhausted idealist claims masquerading as serious theological accounts. In truth, it is not at all clear that most Christians are ready to imagine reconciliation.

~ Willie James Jennings

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure.

~ Bell Hooks

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

~ Raquel Cepeda

The tension between people is palpable, and the ideal of what it means to be and look American becomes a preoccupation to folks around the country, including me.

~ Raquel Cepeda

Are Latino-Americans white? Black? Other? Illegal aliens from Mars? Or are we the very face of America?

~ Raquel Cepeda

Most whites do not have a racial identity, but they would do well to understand what race means for others. They should also ponder the consequences of being the only group for whom such an identity is forbidden and who are permitted no aspirations as a group.

~ Jared Taylor

Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, national identity, any of a dozen minor and irrelevant markers. ~ Valentine

~ Cassandra Clare

Only until all human beings begin to recognize themselves as human beings will prejudice be gone forever. People ask me what race I am, but there is no such thing as race. I just answer: I’m a member of the human race.

~ Amelia Boynton Robinson

He missed her, a longing that tore deep into him. He resented her He wondered endlessly what might have happened. He changed, curled more inwardly into himself. He was, by turns, inflamed by anger, twisted by confusion, withered by sadness.

~ Chimanda Ngozi Adichie

Sentiments that glorify humanity know no racial distinction.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Call up the ever-pure, the effulgent and the ever-radiant character of true humanism in yourself and in others, and no racism shall have the power to thrive in such society even for a few seconds.

~ Abhijit Naskar

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.

~ Abhijit Naskar

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

~ Abhijit Naskar

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.

~ Abhijit Naskar

In the biological sense, race does not exist.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Heart and character have no gender, religion nor color.

~ Charles Spencer King

A man should never be judged by his skill, talent, colour, financial or political status, facial beauty and level of education but by the quality of his character.

~ Paul Bamikole

You and I, my son, are that below. That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.

~ John Howard Griffin

Eventually, some black thinkers believe, this separation may be the shortest route to an authentic communication at some future date when blacks and whites can enter into encounters in which they truly speak as equals and in which the white man will no longer load every phrase with unconscious suggestions that he has something to concede to black men or that he wants to help black men overcome their blackness.

~ John Howard Griffin

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

People often call fighting discrimination being 'PC' because they don't want their own unearned privileges challenged.

~ Dashanne Stokes

If all men are made in God's reflection, then why do some people continue to acknowledge only what is in their part of the mirror? If every man was truly created equal, and in the image of God, then how can any man claim that one race is better than another, or that one nation is less deserving than another?

~ Suzy Kassem