Quotes about race-and-racism-in-america

I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.

At Snortin' Reformatory, a notorious Washington, D.C. jail located in the northern Virginia suburbs, The Afro-Anarchists were being thrown into a cell. It was a situation that the three of them, like many young black males in the D.C. area, had long ago come to expect as a rite of passage. As the door slammed shut behind them, Bucktooth spoke. "Man, Phosphate, they didn't read us our rights or nothin'." "Yeah, Phos,” Fontaine chimed in, "I didn't think they had to beat us, neither. And whoever h

It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really know; but white people also said it, in fact had said it first and said it still. It was when John was five years old and in the first grade that he was first noticed; and since he was noticed by an eye altogether alien and impersonal, he began to perceive, in wild uneasiness, his individual existence.

In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

In the midst of combat, we learned a great deal about mankind and its many different races, creeds and beliefs.

If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys.

It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.

Pride is the problem. Everyone wants to be right so badly they overlook the "rights" of others.

No one in the world -- in the entire world -- know more -- knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here -- and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other.

It's no longer time to take sides for or against race, rather sides against those who still do.

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.

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

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.

That's what a man is supposed to do for his wife. Listen, if a nigger didn't get lynched every now and then, well, there's just no telling what they'd do to us.""Who?" Lily asked."Why, honey, the niggers and our husbands both. I don't care what color they are; men build up steam. And they gotta let it out somewhere. Colored men. White men. They both crazy. Honey, the point is you gotta look at it this way: A whole lotta women can't, "I got a man who'll kill for me."

Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart.

An institution rooted in slavery cannot be the voice of our people.

Why does God ask traumatized people to look at the trauma they initiated through their sin and rebellion? For the same reason God asks us to: it is the truth, and we are free only when we lift up the truth.

I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us—Christians, Muslims, atheists—lived in this fear of this truth.

Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.

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

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.

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

Racism hurts everyone, including racists themselves.

If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.

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.

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

In the white newspapers, they use it against us. They make the Panthers look like we all just want to rip the throats out of some white folks for no good reason. We have good reasons, but we still don't want to do that.

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 just

Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.

...all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me...

That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.

The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else’s children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose.

In all his imaginings, he had never envisioned her crying. He knew that her son had died, but he'd never expected that her pain might be anything he could recognize, almost as though he believed that Negroes had their own special kind of grieving ritual, another language, something other than tears they used to express their sadness.

Acknowledging that all our land was stolen from Native people feels like too great a burden, so we create an alternative reality that allows us to disengage emotionally from the truth.

If origin defines race, then the entire human race is African.

When one attains self-knowledge, distinctions of race and religion vanish.

Only God can break through the variegated walls of skin to capture the one and only hue of the heart. One Blood.