Race Quotes

It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.

~ Elizabeth Alexander

It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the lifelong race.

~ Robert W. Service

We still tell each other that we are lucky to be alive, when our being alive has almost nothing to do with luck, but with geography, pigmentation, and international exchange rates.

~ Joseph O'connor

Ethnic minorities were 10 times more likely than whites to eat at a table where they were the only representative of their race.

~ Rebekah Nathan

There is no inconsistency whatsoever between the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land and the exis­tence of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness. The current sys­tem of control depends on black exceptionalism, it is not disproved or undermined by it.

~ Michelle Alexander

You can beat me in the rat race, but remember u still remain a rat.

~ Reetwika Banerjee

What is key to America’s understanding of class is the persistent belief — despite all evidence to the contrary — that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one’s character. By extension, the failure of a race or ethnic group to move up reflects very poorly on the group as a whole.

~ Michelle Alexander

Once outside, the detectives advanced up an escalator and to a floor with two elevators. One was labeled for the staff, and the other for guests. In the corner was a plain grey door which led up a staircase.“Monsieur Leor…” Jean began. “Are you up for a challenge?”“You want to run up the staircase.” Leor concluded, plainly. “Like schoolboys?”“Ouais, monsieur,” Jean replied, with a silly grin. “You can consider it your preliminary training, if that helps your dignity.

~ Zechariah Barrett

When you're of a different race people distrust you because they are afraid. If you don't give them reason to dislike you, it becomes their problem, not yours.

~ Elizabeth Haydon

No religion, No race, No countries, Today we are human.

~ Sixeye

In their own way, Tom Robinson's manners were as good as Atticus's

~ Harper Lee

Rather than evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and outright contempt. But mostly it's bred indifference.

~ Barack Obama

This writing thing, it ain’t like that hip hop shit, City. For li’l niggas like you,” he told me, “this writing thing is like a gotdamn porta potty. It’s one li’l nigga at a time, shitting in the toilet, funking up the little space he get. And you shit a regular shit or a classic shit. Either way,” he said. “City, you gotta shit classic, then get your black ass on off the pot.” He actually grabbed my hand. “You probably think I’m hyping you just for the money. It ain’t just about the money. It’s really not. It’s about doing whatever it takes for you to have your voice heard. So I don’t know what you’re writing in that book you always carrying around, but it better be classic because you ain’t gonna get no two times to get it right, you hear me?

~ Kiese Laymon

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.

~ Barbara Neely

Most races have a finish line, but some racists are running races where since they never hit the finish line, they never finish lying.

~ Justin K. Mcfarlane Beau

She learned early on, in her adopted country, that race was an easy excuse to stop awkward explanations. People hesitated to probe into such a sensitive matter.

~ E. Journey

We play into the definitions and stereotypes others impose on us and accept the model-minority myth, thinking it's positive, but it's a trap just like any stereotype. They put a piece of model-minority cheese between the metal jaws of their mousetrap, but we're lactose intolerant anyway! We can't even eat the cheese.

~ Eddie Huang

People aren't social, they're tribal. Race doesn't exist, but tribes are fucking real.

~ Mat Johnson

No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition whites show towards me…as long as that same respect and recognition isn’t shown towards everyone of our people in this country–it doesn’t exist for me.

~ Malcolm X

He didn’t see a man with hopes and dreams, with disappointments and accomplishments. All he saw in front of him was just another nigger.

~ Kenneth Eade

On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

If there’s one shade a woman of colour can’t wear it’s got to be the one everyone expects, hasn’t it?

~ Sara Sheridan

Lucy saw the delighted expressions of the guests and knew they looked like something out an Austen movie. Well, at least Jem did. She giggled a little and cleared her throat. “Something funny?” he murmured out of the corner of his mouth. “Just thinking how you’re just like Captain Wentworth and I’m just like Tina Turner.

~ Mary Jane Hathaway

The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated -- that's the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don't get a lot of practical experience.

~ Ben Aaronovitch

We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.

~ Kiese Laymon

Unfortunately, honesty hasn't always been a part of the job description for the police force, especially when dealing with our people. Today I must appeal to their sense of integrity, because we need the Mobile Police Department. Before we can do our job, they've got to do theirs...

~ Ravi Howard

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.

~ Douglas A. Blackmon

By unspoken agreement, we all picked an invisible line in the cracked asphalt and toed it.

~ Chistopher Mcdougall

If you chose Option 2 [confrontation], you did well. People will be less likely to engage you in office small talk of any kind, but that's likely a benefit when you consider the fact that every ten minutes of office small talk takes one year off of your life.

~ Baratunde R. Thurston

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.

~ Douglas A. Blackmon

See, a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That's all. The rest you can deal with. It's not about black or white. It's about God and don't let anyone tell you different. All this Jungle fever! Shoot! The Jungle fever goes away, honey, and then what are you gonna do?

~ James Mcbride

Obama will win. We will win. Then we will continue to lose. And the right questions will never be honestly asked or answered, and it's all just too much.

~ Kiese Laymon

I'm white and I don't dance, but that doesn't mean I have all the answers.

~ Charles Portis

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

The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.

~ Roxane Gay

Race is there. You're tire of hearing about it? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it.

~ Jon Stewart

Run the race of life at your own pace.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There is nothing like race, is there?

~ Oscar Wilde

p 18 - Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face in the same primeval forest. That we are here today evidences their victory.

~ Edgar Rice Burroughs

I believe that reappropriation can be a powerful tool for creating social change. Sometimes, things like irony, satire, or humor are more effective in getting at difficult truths or concepts like white privilege, orientalism, and the exoticization of culture.

~ Simon S. Tam