Racism Quotes

We are not past racism. It took us 500 and however many years to get us where we are; it's not gonna change in one day or in one election. We made a step maybe, which they'll try and take away from us as soon as they can. But I mean what the fuck is the Tea Party about? It's not about tea; it ain't about trans

~ Either

Some lurid things have been said about me—that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth—that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I'd only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been true when I was still on the correct side, and that such shocking deformities didn't seem to count for so much then. Arguing with the Stalinist mentality for more than three decades now, and doing a bit of soapboxing and street-corner speaking on and off, has meant that it takes quite a lot to hurt my tender feelings, or bruise my milk-white skin.

~ Christopher Hitchens

You are not special. You're just fucking not. You're a bland, boring motherfucker just like everybody else. You ever been to the mall and just looked in the eyes of the fellow travelers and seen how dull and lifeless their eyes are? Yours look like that too. You know why? 'Cause you're just as bland, you're just as fucking boring, there's nothing special about you. And trying to piggyback on the accomplishments of your race, or like, any fucking larger group really, is pathetic. You have to stand on individual merit and you just can't accept the fact that you suck. It's alright! I suck, Weber sucks, everyone sucks! We're all fucking shit, we suck dick, we're lame as fuck. And that's okay. That's fine.

~ T.j. Kirk

The precise ancestry of a black drug dealer or cop killer is irrelevant. His blackness predicts and explains his crime. He reinforces the racist presumption. It is only when that presumption is questioned that a fine analysis of ancestry is invoked. Frederick Douglass was an ordinary nigger while working the fields. But as a famed abolitionist, it was often said that his genius must derive from his white half.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

And you know who's especially stupid? People who look at how unexceptional and bland and boring they are and say, You know how I can remedy this? I will take solace in the accomplishments of my entire race. That way, I can draw attention away from the fact that I personally have not accomplished shit!

~ T.j. Kirk

Ed Lim’s daughter, Monique, was a junior now, but as she’d grown up, he and his wife had noted with dismay that there were no dolls that looked like her. At ten, Monique had begun poring over a mail-order doll catalog as if it were a book–expensive dolls, with n ames and stories and historical outfits, absurdly detailed and even more absurdly expensive.‘Jenny Cohen has this one,’ she’d told them, her finger tracing the outline of a blond doll that did indeed resemble Jenny Cohen: sweet faced with heavy bangs, slightly stocky. 'And they just made a new one with red hair. Her mom’s getting it for her sister Sarah for Hannukkah.’ Sarah Cohen had flaming red hair, the color of a penny in the summer sun. But there was no doll with black hair, let alone a face that looked anything like Monique’s. Ed Lim had gone to four different toy stores searching for a Chinese doll; he would have bought it for his daughter, whatever the price, but no such thing ex

~ Celeste Ng

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

Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and criticize others who have to fight for the things you take for granted.

~ Dashanne Stokes

As fantastical as America’s space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.

~ Margot Lee Shetterly

I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism--in order to believe themselves to be nonracist.

~ Sherman Alexie

White privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, an absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost.

~ Reni Eddo-Lodge

Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.

~ Maya Angelou

I like being present in spaces where I am not welcome because you do not deserve to feel comfortable just because you're racist or sexist or small-minded.

~ Scaachi Koul

To be born into, to go to school, to study, to learn, to play, to worship, to love, to work and to die in segregation and not have one single person who loved, mentored or guided me convey that there was any loss.

~ Robin Diangelo

Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent.

~ Reni Eddo-Lodge

They told me there was very little racial prejudice in Hawaii. Like a woman is just a little bit pregnant.

~ Dick Gregory

It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the Moon as to put a bone in your nose.

~ William A. Henry Iii

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'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.

~ Carlos Wallace

African-Amendment.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

There are white people who know how to act politely to blacks, but deep down you know they're uncomfortable. They're worse, more dangerous than those who speak their minds, because they don't know what they're capable of.

~ Cristina García

For many years in Cuba, nobody spoke of the problem between blacks and whites. It was considered too disagreeable to discuss. But my father spoke to me clearly so that I would understand what happened to his father and his uncles during the Little War of 1912, so that I would know how our men were hunted down day and night like animals, and finally hung by their genitals from the lampposts in Guáimaro. The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books. Why, then, should I trust anything I read? I trust only what I see, what I know with my heart, nothing more.

~ Cristina García

One strain of African American thought holds that it is a violent black recklessness—the black gangster, the black rioter—that strikes the ultimate terror in white America. Perhaps it does, in the most individual sense. But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract—The Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Hilly raises her voice about three octaves higher when she talks to coloured people. Elizabeth smiles like she's talking to a child, although certainly not her own. I am starting to notice things.

~ Kathryn Stockett

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

WHITE NATIONALISTS & BLACK LIVES MATTER: The harder you swing the pendulum one way, the more violently it will swing back.

~ A.e. Samaan

Discrimination is not just racial now. It’s also about the kind of body parts you have.

~ Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

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

~ Dashanne Stokes

I don't like the way our community throws the word around like it's water, because it's a derogatory term. A lot of times people come up to me and say, What's up my nigger? I'll respond, Nah, wait a minute. What? Oh, oh, what's up my brother? Sometimes you have to check people, because if it gets loose with us then white people will start to use it. I know a bunch of white people that started to get lax so I had to check them. Some black people were afraid to check them because they thought it was cool. You can never turn that word around and make it cool Nigger is just derogatory, it's wrong, and it's a fucked up term. It's not a word of love, Yo, what's up my nigger? Fuck that. You can't turn the word puss around. Go around and say, What's up pussy to a brother. He'll try to kill you. What's up dickhead? You can't turn that around, so you can't turn nigger around as hard as you try.

~ Chuck D

Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Marton interacted, thus transforming a seventeen-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim.

~ Jesmyn Ward

The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes— I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether— is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.

~ James Baldwin

When you grow up knowing that you deserve to be on top, that the lesser houses exist to serve your house’s glorious destiny, you take such things for granted. You’re born assuming that someone else is paying the cost of your life. It’s just the way things are. What happens during annexation—it’s a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.

~ Ann Leckie

If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them?

~ Amitav Ghosh

...[E]xcept the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an intermitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period. Upon the slightest and most unreasonable pretences, as well as upon accusations the most absurd and groundless, their persons and property were exposed to every turn of popular fury... Yet the passive courage inspired by the love of gain induced the Jews to dare the various evils to which they were subjected, in consideration of the immense profits which they were enabled to realise in a country naturally so wealthy as England. In spite of every kind of discouragement, and even of the special court of taxations already mentioned, called the Jews' Exchequer, erected for the very purpose of despoiling and distressing them, the Jews increased, multiplied, and accumulated huge sums, which they transferred from one hand to another by means of bills of exchange-an invention for which commerce is said to be indebted to them, and which enabled them to transfer their wealth from land to land, that, when threatened with oppression in one country, their treasure might be secured in another. The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which they were visited...

~ Sir Walter Scott

An elevator doesn’t exist without its freight. If there’s no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence. The elevator and the passenger need each other.

~ Colson Whitehead

It’s got fuck all to do with being racist. I don’t care if he’s purple or orange or fucking yellow with pink spots! Although if he’s yellow with pink spots perhaps we should call a first aider. All I care about is his CSCS card and this Home Office card that is now in my possession

~ Karl Wiggins

Vagrancy laws and other laws defining activities such as mischief and insulting gestures as crimes were enforced vigorously against blacks. The aggressive enforcement of these criminal offenses opened up an enormous market for convict leasing.

~ Michelle Alexander

The Left would like to believe that racism—not the breakdown of marriage and family, the absence of religious norms, a degraded popular culture, and other issues that all concern values—is the primary impediment to black progress in America. Therefore the Left declares racism the greatest impediment to black progress.

~ Dennis Prager