100 Quotes About Racism In America

Electing a bigot enables further bigotry. DaShanne Stokes

We, the black people, the most displaced, the poorest, the most maligned and scourged, we had the glorious task of reclaiming the soul and saving the honor of the country. We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love. We, the most feared and apprehensive must take fear and by love, change it into hope. We, who die daily in large and small ways, must take the demon death and turn it into life.- Martin Luther King Jr. . Maya Angelou

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

Our fight against racism should not be a matter of black and white, but good and evil. Kathy McClary

Jews and Asians are only 7 percent of the total population, and between them they dominate in fields like medicine and engineering, not to mention entrepreneurship and academics. They rarely end up in prison or gangs (this is especially true of Jews). And while they are historically poor and persecuted, they have not allowed themselves to stay in that position. Take their story and compare it to black Americans and how can we explain the canyon that separates them? I’m sure the Jesse Jacksons of the world would sooner become Holocaust deniers than admit to the real answer: Family. Education. Ambition.Family.Education.Ambition.Whenever the plight of the minority in America is discussed, you’ll notice that Jews and Asians are left out of the conversation. In fact, many school systems are now trying to figure out how to get LESS of them in advanced placement courses and prestigious colleges. They’ve become too successful, apparently. But it’s not just their success that the race mongers hate, it’s HOW they accomplished it. Their men don’t father dozens of out-of-wedlock babies with dozens of women. Their households insist on discipline and academic success. They work hard, they are driven. Asians may now be at the point where they actually enjoy preferential bias. If I’m an employer and an Asian walks in to apply for a job, I’m going to assume he’s an achiever. That’s not a stereotype, that’s called a reputation. And they’ve freaking earned it. Family. Education. Ambition. These three things really are a recipe for success. If you don’t believe me, ask the next Asian or Jew you meet. And then make sure to take care of your co-pay on the way out. . Matt Walsh

Maybe he wouldn't end up the kind of man who needed to use his body for work. Maybe he'd be a new kind of black man altogether, one who got to use his mind. Yaa Gyasi

Those with unearned privileges often spin things as 'political correctness' to further silence those they wish to oppress. DaShanne Stokes

I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man's court, Ray had told me, by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn't. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. Barack Obama

When the media is controlled by people who runs the world, you are only going to get news that they want you to know. They will paint anther's man country's hero a tyrant, a dictator or a murderer and favor the next just to divide and conquer the people. Henry Johnson Jr

When you want to join a prestigious social club, do you wonder if your race will make it difficult to join? If you do well in a situation, do you expect to be called a credit to your race? Or to be described as different from the majority of your race? If you need legal or medical help, do you worry that your race might work against you? If you take a job with an affirmative action employer, do you worry that your co-workers will think that you are unqualified and were hired only because of your race? Do you worry that your children will not have books and school materials that are about people of their own race? . Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Bigotry lives not just in our words, but in our actions, thoughts, and institutions. DaShanne Stokes

Prejudice is learned. What will you teach others through your actions and words? DaShanne Stokes

This is just a nigger talkin', an' a busted-back nigger. So it don't mean nothing, see? You couldn't remember it anyways. I seen it over an' over-a guy talkin' to another guy and it don't make no difference if he don't hear or understand. The thing is, they're talkin', or they're settin' still not talkin'. It don't make no difference, no difference. John Steinbeck

Self Hate: The deadliest 'dis-ease' experienced by wounded souls. T.F. Hodge

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. Unknown

It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else's blood. . Toni Morrison

Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city - Birmingham, Alabama - five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which many people will condemn - at least in words. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it. . Stokely Carmichael

If you'd combat bigotry, use honest language and call things out for what they really are. DaShanne Stokes

Those who benefit from unearned privilege are too often quick to discount those who don't. DaShanne Stokes

Bigotry hurts the economy, so the next time you want to blame minorities for your problems, first take a look in the mirror. DaShanne Stokes

If you can't see past my name, you can't see me. DaShanne Stokes

I once listened to a woman describe a group of men marching toward her house with sticks lit afire, screaming things like 'git the nigger' and 'kill the nigger bitch.' Those tiki torches weren't about protest. They were about a statement. It said, 'We're still here because we never left. Janelle Gray

Privilege is when your voice is the norm but still you claim to be unheard. DaShanne Stokes

If you love your country, you must be willing to defend it from fraud, bigotry, and recklessness--even from a president. DaShanne Stokes

Trump didn't divide America. He just doused us with gasoline and fanned the flames. DaShanne Stokes

Building bridges takes us further than building walls. DaShanne Stokes

It's a scary world we live in when a person of color endorses a racist for president. DaShanne Stokes

Discrimination is discrimination, even when people claim it's 'tradition. DaShanne Stokes

Calling for an end to hate shouldn't be treated as a punishable offense. DaShanne Stokes

They hate you not because of what you have done but because of who you are; you are different from who they are, and you are occupying the ground they want for themselves. Bangambiki Habyarimana

You're a Black educated fool, son. These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them you're lying, they'll tell the world even if you prove you're telling the truth. Because it's the kind of lie they want to hear. Ralph Ellison

When a political opponent resorts to the racist card, it's a sure sign of moral bankruptcy: there's no decent argument left in the armoury. Alex Morritt

They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn't make them subhuman. You are telling them Jesus loves them, but not much. Harper Lee

Racism is dead only to those who've closed their eyes and ears to the whole world around them. DaShanne Stokes

Unfortunately there is no vaccination to protect the soul from the menacing disease of social ignorance manifested by character-void homosapiens. Tracey Bond

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

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

It might not seem self-evident that impunity for white violence against blacks would engender black-on-black murder. But when people are stripped of legal protection and placed in desperate straits, they are more, not less, likely to turn on each other. Lawless settings are terrifying; if people can do whatever they want to each other, there are always enough bullies to make it ugly. Americans are nostalgic for the village setting and hold dear the notion of community, so the idea that the oppressed do not band together in solidarity is counter to our myths. But community spawns communal justice; the village gives rise to the feud. Jill Leovy

The textbook in question in the infamous Scope's Monkey Trial was partially written by the Harvard educated white supremacist, Charles B. Davenport. A.E. Samaan

It's not 'over-sensitivity' to ask to be treated with the same dignity and respect shown to others. DaShanne Stokes

There is nothing 'honorable' or 'reasonable' in giving a pass to those who want to discriminate. DaShanne Stokes

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

[whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white– Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish–and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies. The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury. TaNehisi Coates

Freedman Town serves a good purpose - not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town's purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say 'Will you look at those animals? That's what kind of people those people are'. . Ben H. Winters

The races are like America's children. White people are the firstborn, so they were Dad's favorite. Black people are the second kids, the abused ones, so they still hate Dad. Latinos are the third, caught in the middle and always trying to make peace between the other siblings. Asians are the youngest, and get good marks in school, but basically are just trying to keep their heads down and not get involved. And Native Americans are the old uncle who owns a house and everyone else in the family was like, "He's not using that! Let's move in! . Colin Quinn

I am still hoping to see an America that would gradually move beyond race, only in times when old ideas would no longer lives and the new will grow with the young generation. Henry Johnson Jr

Bigotry and sexism destroy the unity needed for a nation to live. DaShanne Stokes

Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. TaNehisi Coates

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

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

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

Never be content to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon. Your rights could be next. DaShanne Stokes

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

People often call fighting racism being 'PC' when they don't want to confront their own prejudice DaShanne Stokes

Racism hurts everyone, including racists themselves. DaShanne Stokes

This so called 'Home of the Brave'why isn't anybody Backing us up! When they c these crooked ass Redneck copsconstantly Jacking us up Tupac Shakur

I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. TaNehisi Coates

When I walk in, they may like me or dislike me, but everybody knows I'm here Maya Angelou

The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us. Chuck D

Segmentation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people. Coretta Scott King

I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti- Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs. Richard Wright

Although people like Deborah Lipstadt, the Emory University professor who has written and lectured widely on Holocaust denial, have exhorted Jewish parents to just say no to intermarriage, much the way they expect their children not to take drugs, a large majority of parents (and more than a few rabbis) are unable to lay down opposition to intermarriage as a strict operating principle. Ellen J. McClain

The problem is, there is no geographical cure. No matter where we (Black American Folk) go, we are still too plugged into this place. Our cousins, grandmothers, aunts, nieces will be in this place. And the second we start looking at it as a "them" problem, we become another problem. Darnell Lamont Walker

I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal. Alexander H. Stephens

Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. . Alexander H. Stephens

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own. . Toni Morrison

I do not believe we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers this planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. TaNehisi Coates

As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s 'the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.'  David T. Hardy

...The straitjackets of race prejudice and discrimination do not wear only southern labels. The subtle, psychological technique of the North has approached in its ugliness and victimization of the Negro the outright terror and open brutality of the South. Unknown

It's hard to imagine hate that I am facing from allover the world yet I am not alone with mistakes. Auliq Ice

They've been practicing racism so long, it's perfect. Darnell Lamont Walker

People buy into this false notion of reverse racism, where they believe that just because there’s a group of people getting together to share something about their heritage that we’re excluding white people. But that’s not the reality. Simon S. Tam

We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience. Unknown

The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning...they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay. Unknown

They walked off down the hall in the direction of a sign that said Colored Waiting Room. Billie guessed white folks didn't have to wait. Elaine Hussey

They tell us race is an invention, that there is no genetic variation between two black people than there is between a black person and a white person. Then they tell us black people have a worse kind of breast cancer and get more fibroid. And white folk get cystic fibrosis and osteoporosis. So what’s the deal, is race an invention or not? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

The spectacle of the shooting suggest an event out of time, as if the killing of black people with white-supremacist justification interrupts anything other than regular television programming. But Dylan Storm Roof did not create himself from nothing. He as grown up with the rhetoric and orientation of racism. Jesmyn Ward

If "RACE" becomes the norm, then harmony will not prevail. Henry Johnson Jr

As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the “gentleman and soldier.” However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism–an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves. Wendell Berry

Privilege is presuming to speak for others you know nothing about. DaShanne Stokes

This world that we live in would be perfect if there were less prejudice and people who think they are better than others. Werley Nortreus