Racism Quotes

Political correctness' as 'over-sensitivity' is code for saying the privileged shouldn't have their unearned privileges questioned.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Saying something is 'politically correct' is often a way of dismissing the voices of the oppressed.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of world economy, is so far advanced that racial purity can have meaning only to a numbskull.

~ Wilhelm Reich

In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.

~ Trevor Noah

My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid - not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.

~ Trevor Noah

The betrayal I now felt was greater because it had been perpetrated with the greatest of charm and courtesy.

~ E.r. Braithwaite

It was like a disease, and these children whom I loved without caring about their skins or their backgrounds, they were tainted with the hateful virus which attacked their vision, distorting everything that was not white or English.

~ E.r. Braithwaite

When someone calls you a 'nigger', then you feel sorry for him... You have to pity him because his mind has such a sorry way of expressing itself.

~ Adam Makos

...[W]e must admit that... law must be valid, not merely for men, but for all rational creatures generally, not merely under certain contingent conditions or with exceptions, but with absolute necessity...

~ Immanuel Kant

But why do we say nothing? Ujunwa asked. She raised her voice and looked at the others. Why do we always say nothing?

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I still worry about Africa, we are slaves to western and Eastern Brands and we do not cherish and love our own. We are not even in charge of our economies because we depend heavily on what happens in the East or West, Worse-off we still judge each other based on skin color because those from Northern Africa and even some in East Africa believe that they are not Africans and they do not integrate with the darker Africans. For centuries we are still being victimized by other races from other continents, because they despise our dark skin and think that we are lesser than them..Xenophobia still lingers and some have the cold heart to kill their black African brothers and sisters and yet the people who owe them reparation and economic freedom are originally from the western countries. We still are held captive by our governments , who abuse our resources only to feed their pockets at the expense our crumbling nations. Why should we continue to suffer when we can apply Pan Africanism and Rise above the Western and Eastern Countries, but sadly we do not because we are not united.. Africa must unite to solve its problems,Happy Africa Day

~ Tare Munzara

In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven't lynched somebody then you can't be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters. They are people with loving families, regular folk who pay taxes. Somebody needs to get the job of deciding who is racist and who isn't. Or maybe it's time to just scrap the word 'racist.' Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?

~ Steven D. Levitt

We'd never talked about it, but I figured you knew the rules. If a cop stopped, you didn't run, you didn't talk back, you didn't ever, ever get angry. White people could do that—hell, they could shoot up a church and then ask for Burger King—but not us. We got killed at traffic stops for speeding, for having broken taillights, for knowing our rights.

~ Una Lamarche

There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when there's a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler's head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror.

~ Chris L. Hayes

What sorts of people dig up a black grandparent and then demand special privileges? What does it mean when these same people spew racist abuse at the rest of their ancestry? What does it signify when a society rewards them for this type of behavior?

~ Daniel Greenfield

White liberals are always saying, What can we do?” I mean, they’re always coming to help black people. I thought of an analogy. If you were walking down the street and a man had a gun on another man – let’s say both of them were white – and you had to help somebody, whom would you help? It’s obvious to me that if I were walking down the street, and a man had a gun on another man, and I was going to help, I’d help the man who didn’t have the gun, if the man who had the fun was just pulling the gun on the other man for no apparent reason – if he was just going to rob him or shoot him because he didn’t like him. The only way I could help is either to get a gun and shoot the man with the gun, or take the gun away from him – join the fellow who doesn’t have a gun and both of us gang up on the man with the gun. But white liberals never do that. When the man has the gun, they walk around him and they come to the victim, and they say “Let me help you,” and what they mean is “help you adjust to the situation with the man who has the gun on you.If indeed white liberals are going to help, their only job is to get the gun from the man and talk to him, because he is a sick man. The black man is not the sick man, it is the white man who is sick, he’s the one who picked up the gun.

~ Stokely Carmichael

Racism, hate, and bigotry are EVIL and WICKED no matter how you try to rationalize it. I couldn’t imagine living my life with this crap in my heart. I love building new relationships and I enjoy learning about different cultures! If people would change their thinking and open up their hearts, they’d be amazed at the beautiful relationships that they could have. And, for the record, I couldn’t imagine ALL of my friends being black. There are too many amazing people from different backgrounds that I still have yet to meet. NO WAY would I limit my relationships based on race, absolutely not! I am free to like and love who I want to and I won’t allow anybody to persuade me with their opinions. I have my own mind! I’m my own person! I refuse to dislike and/or hate another race ‘just because!’ I am Stephanie Lahart: BOLD. BRAVE. STRONG.

~ Stephanie Lahart

A bunch of Latinas at Pitzer College decided to let white girls know that they shouldn’t wear hoops anymore, because that’s appropriating a style.... I’ve never worn hoop earrings for the purpose of “feeling ethnic,” nor have I ever associated hoop earrings with a certain culture. They’ve always been an accessory I like. It’s really as simple as that....I can’t wear hoops because I didn’t “create the culture as a coping mechanism for marginalization”? I can’t wear hoops because I’m not a feminist? I can’t wear hoops because some Latinas can’t afford it? I can’t wear hoops because I refuse to buy into your hypersensitive BS?....Does anyone else realize how completely ridiculous that sounds?

~ Hannah Bleau

On the sound of handcuffs--For me it's the sound of all light and hope crashing down on a minority.

~ Moctezuma Johnson

I'm not white, no, but I'm just close enough that I could be, and just far enough that you know I'm not. I can check off a diversity box for you and I don't make you nervous - at least not on the surface. I'm the whole package!

~ Scaachi Koul

...out of the counterfeiting of the black American's identity [in blackface minstrelsy] there arises a profound doubt in the white man's mind as to the authenticity of his own image of himself. He, after all, went into the business when he refused the king's shilling and revolted. He had put on a mask of his own, as it were...For the ex-colonials, the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask, and it imposed not only the discipline of national self-consciousness, it gave Americans an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality, between the discontinuity of social tradition and that sense of the past which clings to the mind. And perhaps even an awareness of the joke that society is man's creation, not God's. Americans began their revolt from the English fatherland when they dumped the tea into Boston Harbor, masked as Indians, and the mobility of the society created in this limitless space has encouraged the use of the mask for good and evil ever since.

~ Ralph Ellison

Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.

~ Ralph Ellison

America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting alone was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

~ Ralph Ellison

Mom talks about moving to Canada as though my father had requested she start wearing fun hats. Why not try it? she thought, instead of This fucking lunatic wants me to go to a country made of ice and casual racism.

~ Scaachi Koul

We live in a nation of pigs and murderers.

~ James Baldwin

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

...they ain't never met nobody they didn't lie to and steal from.

~ James Baldwin

Laws ostensibly directed at undocumented immigrants inevitably affect the treatment of lawfully present immigrants and citizens who share the ethnic, racial, or national origin characteristics of undocumented immigrants.

~ Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Imagine the world as a crayon box, and it took every colour to draw each of us. Adding a shade lighter and darker with each interaction. None would be black or white, either purely absorbing all, or reflecting each. #ColourMeSpotless

~ Nikhil Sharda

The 1790 Naturalization law determined that free white persons could naturalize after two years of residency, and established that the children of citizens would also be citizens. Soon after, in 1795, Congress extended the residency period to five years, and in 1798 extended the residency requirement even further, to fourteen years.

~ Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Racism is not funny, because it won't solve anything, but making it worst instead, because racism is the reason the world is no longer great.

~ Werley Nortreus

Tolerance of intolerance enables oppression.

~ Dashanne Stokes

White people covered the earth like lice.

~ Louise Erdrich

Reducing a group to a slur or stereotype reduces us all.

~ Dashanne Stokes

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

~ Dashanne Stokes