Colorblind Racism Quotes

I was co-leading a workshop with an African American man. A white participant said to him, "I don't see race; I don't see you as black." My co-trainer's response was, "Then how will you see racism?" He then explained to her that he was black, he was confident that she could see this, and that his race meant that he had a very different experience in life than she did. If she were ever going to understand or challenge racism, she would need to acknowledge this difference. Pretending that she did not noticed that he was black was not helpful to him in any way, as it denied his reality - indeed, it refused his reality - and kept hers insular and unchallenged. This pretense that she did not notice his race assumed that he was "just like her," and in so doing, she projected her reality onto him. For example, I feel welcome at work so you must too; I have never felt that my race mattered, so you must feel that yours doesn't either. But of course, we do see the race of other people, and race holds deep social meaning for us. ~ Robin DiAngelo

What does it mean when I say that 'I don't see race?' It means that because I learned to see no difference between 'white' and 'color,' I have white-washed my own sense of self. It means that I know more about what it is to be a white person than what it is to be Asian, and I am a stranger among both. ~ Michi Trota

Racism is a complex and interconnected system that adapts to challenges over time. Colorblind ideology was a very effective adaptation to the challenges of the Civil Rights Era. Colorblind ideology allows society to deny the reality of racism in the face of its persistence, while making it more difficult to challenge than when it was openly espoused. ~ Robin DiAngelo

Imagine for a just a moment, if you will, that the slaves who were brought to America weren't dark-skinned. Instead, white people and black people were both the same neutral skin color. The only way that slave holders were able to tell the slaves apart from themselves was by marking them in some manner, like a brand or something. After Abolition, when former slaves had children they were no longer given marks to tell them apart from anyone else. Imagine now that illegal Mexicans who sneak into America in hopes of making a better life for their families are this same neutral skin color, just like "white" people and "black" people. There is no concrete way to tell them apart from anyone else except that they might sound different. But once they have children who sound just like everyone else there is no concrete way to tell them apart from the "natives." As human beings, we naturally find ways to categorize ourselves. The very first thing that we do when we see a person is compare their appearance to our own. We use an internal ranking system. Maybe it's time to consciously abandon our internal ranking system. The only way to achieve true equality is through colorblindness. Let's try a little harder and see what happens. ~ Aaron B. Powell

I happen to be colorblind. Racism is not my motto. One day, I strongly expect every color to love as one family. ~ Michael Jackson

The shift may, in fact, come as something of a relief, as it moves our collective focus away from a wholly unrealistic goal to one that is within anyone's reach right now. After all, to aspire to colorblindness is to aspire to a state of being in which you are not capable of seeing racial difference - a practical impossibility for most of us. The shift also invites a more optimistic view of human capacity. The colorblindness ideal is premised on the notion that we, as a society, can never be trusted to see race and treat each other fairly or with genuine compassion. A commitment to color consciousness, by contrast, places faith in our capacity as humans to show care and concern for others, even as we are fully cognizant of race and possible racial differences. ~ Michelle Alexander

Education in this country is about how to maintain the status quo and to perpetuate racism. ~ Jane Elliot

He got a tan over break. I used to tell him he was so pale he looked like a marshmallow. He hated that I compared him to food. I told him that's what he got for calling me caramel. It shut him up. ~ Angie Thomas

I maintain that the period during the first half of the 1990s, the period in which rising inequality reached its peak, was a period in which we came very, very close to a demagogic immobilization of racism in this society. ~ William Julius Wilson

Every time one of us starts talking about more effective immigration controls, somebody else throws up the Statue of Liberty, how we're a nation of immigrants and all of that. The debate takes on tinges of racism, emotion. ~ Alan K. Simpson

The crisis created by an inability to distinguish the Bible on race from the Bible on slavery meant that when the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished, systemic racism continued unchecked as the great moral anomaly in a supposedly Christian America. ~ Mark A. Noll

Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become, in fact, the racism of the intelligentsia. ~ George Gilder

Your silence is power to the savages. ~ Abhijit Naskar

He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs. ~ Joseph Conrad

I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color ~ Malcolm X

It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred! ~ Isaac Asimov

Racist" is not - as Richard Spencer argues - a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it - and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

All racists are irresponsible. ~ James A. Baldwin

The definition of the word 'racist' has evolved…or devolved…or, more accurately, ballooned…over the course of my lifetime. It used to be that a 'racist' was simply someone who hated others for their skin color. By that definition, I am not, nor have I ever been, a racist. People give you plenty of reasons to hate them before you even have to consider their melanin levels. Most people I've hated have been white - especially the ones who play an infantile, morally hierarchical, status-jockeying game of 'tag' by calling me a racist.
Another common idea of what constitutes a 'racist' is someone who scapegoats other races for their problems. Nah, that's not me. I blame my parents and, increasingly, myself. So by that definition, I am not a racist. ~ Jim Goad

It wasn't the intention to do something important, or to even relate about social issues. The ground is so fertile in the justice world, dealing with the death penalty and the Innocence Project, for characters that have a moral ambiguity, which we were both attracted to. It's the idea that everybody has their reasons. Whatever their actions are, whether you agree with them or not, you can understand why they're feeling that way, in terms of racism or even the death penalty. ~ Richard LaGravenese

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective. ~ Maya Angelou

Paranoia is transmissible from mind to mind, but it does not go by the route of reason. It can therefore change its rationalization while remaining essentially the same. ~ William Nicholls

The best cure for racism is to have somebody shoot at you. Man, it does not matter then what color the arse is that comes to save yours-black or white, you're ready to give it a big fat kiss. ~ Wilbur Smith

Despite the important of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system. ~ Angela Y. Davis

To Black women, the issue is not whether white women are more or less racist than white men, but that they are racist. If women committed to feminist revolution, be they Black or white, are to achieve any understanding of the charged connections between white women and Black women, we must first be willing to examine woman's relationship to society, to race, and to American culture - as it is, and not as we would ideally have it be. That means confronting the reality of white female racism. Sexist discrimination has prevented white women from assuming the dominant role in the perpetuation of white racial imperialism, but it has not prevented white women from absorbing, supporting, and advocating racist ideology or acting individually as racist oppressors in various spheres of American life. Every women's movement in America, from its earliest origin to the present day, has been built on a racist foundation, a fact which in no way invalidates feminism as a political ideology. The racial apartheid social structure that characterized 19th and early 20th century American life was mirrored in the women's rights movement. The first white women's rights advocates were never seeking social equality for all women. They were seeking social equality for white women. ~ Bell Hooks

I didn't want to argue with my hosts. I wanted them to talk. But I felt like reminding Li that perhaps forty million Chinese people had died of starvation a half century earlier because they followed their government's orders. It was the largest famine in history. A snapshot taken then would have given a very different picture of the supposedly essential character of Chinese people, and it would have entirely missed the point. Governments matter. Markets matter. History matters. International circumstances matter. ~ Howard W. French

I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce "ordinary men" to become their "willing executioners. ~ Christopher R. Browning

It's easy to pretend 'to be fierce and fearless because living your truth takes real courage. Real fearless and fierce women admit mistakes and they work to correct them. We stand up and we use our voices for things other than self promotion. We don't stand by and let racism and sexism and homophobia run rapid on our watch. Real fearless and fierce women complement other women and we recognize and embrace that their shine in no way diminishes our light and that it actually makes our light shine brighter. ~ Gabrielle Union

A racist notion found in neoshamanic circles is placing high value on indigenous wisdom but not on indigenous people. ~ S. Kelley Harrell

The Burger King robbery was committed by a couple of black kids, so that fact justifies pulling over EVERY black guy? ~ Mark M. Bello

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

In African American culture, class bias is the handmaiden of intraracial prejudice that privileges the near-white or light-complexioned person over the darker-hued. ~ Rita B. Dandridge

We hate some persons because we do not know them; and we will not know them because we hate them. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

While at the University of Chicago a couple of friends and I went to dinner at some restaurant in China Town night. Oblivious to the fact that my idiocy can be heard outside of a five-foot radius, I started in with the "You been here four hour. You go now," routine. Ha ha, we all laugh because infantile racism is funny. A little while later I walked back to the bathroom, and as I went down the hall to the "Male Room," I passed this rickety open door. I peered in to see two little Chinese kids looking at me, holding their eyes wide open with their fingers (to give a Caucasian look), and saying: "Hot Dogs! Baseball! Hot Dogs! Baseball!" I laughed so hard, I almost didn't make it to the bathroom. You win this round, Chinese kids. ~ Tucker Max

There's no racism with the Internet. ~ ASAP Ferg

We keep referring to white supremacy as just a 'system' or 'institution', rather than a living, insidious, expansive colonial force that works to 'get inside', consume and destroy. ~ Aph Ko

Discrimination is one of the most egregious experiences a human can endure. ~ Asa Don Brown

Hitler's Nazi mob didn't think of themselves as the bad guys. They thought of themselves as the victims of evil foreigners. Just like Trump's MAGA mob. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

And that damned man in the White House doesn't help things any. He represents the type of political hatred I'm talking about. Guys like him play to the worst fears of white men. Are you having a bad time of it right now? Lost your job? Having difficulty making ends meet? It's not my fault or your fault. It's the black man's fault. It's the Muslims' fault. Blame a Mexican immigrant. Man's got everyone lining up, taking sides, white people versus people of color,
different religions arguing their way is the right way. This is a bad time in America. It's an especially terrible time for a black woman to be taking on a white cop or the white establishment. ~ Mark M. Bello

As long as there is racial privilege, racism will never end. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

I hope that my new status will be an example of Israeli-Palestinian co-existence, I believe that the destinies of the Israeli people and the Palestinian people are inextricably linked. ~ Daniel Barenboim

We must fight intolerance, racism and the far-Right. ~ David Lagercrantz

When I did a year-long study in 2005 of European countries integrating Muslims into their cultures, France came in the lowest of the rank. Sweden was not far behind, though, which is worrying, as racism in France is much closer to the bone. ~ Janine Di Giovanni

Segregation in the American South was bankrolled by the wealthy eugenicist from the Northeast, Wickliffe Draper. ~ A.E. Samaan

When you meet someone, and you find that they are prejudiced against your kind, it might be your chance, not to confirm, but to be the one to finally change their mind. ~ Criss Jami

Human beings are very skilled at pretending they are not what they are, and ignoring what is inside them. This includes ignoring their natural instincts, their primal instincts, because they have this notion that they are evolving faster than other life, have evolved further, and are therefore superior. Take racism for example. As abhorrent as people may consider it, human beings are essentially tribal, and racism is simply a survival instinct embedded deep inside us, born from thousands of years of survival and experience. ~ Robert Black

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old - is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. ~ Barack Obama

I've seen racism in my audiences. For example, I've seen people laugh at every other group, but then clam up when it comes to their community. You can't laugh at everyone else and then not laugh at yourself. You shouldn't be at my show if you can't laugh at yourself. ~ Russell Peters

I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

The primary ideology that operated to create, socialize, and reproduce them was not the ideology of racism. It was that of universalism. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

It was not easy to go from being one of the seven righteous pillars holding up the whole planet and human race to being just another mental patient. I remember talking to a woman who was ending racism and asking her if it was part of a bigger program or if racism was the whole deal. As someone who had gone back to the beginning of time and dealt with issues of whether or not life itself was a good idea, I wasn't sure that just getting rid of racism was a big enough prize.

....In the eighties when I was called out of retirement to defeat communism, it was over my strenuous objections. "I don't even dislike communism all that much," I objected. "It seems so beside the point." "The Republicans are going to take credit for this and ride it into the ground," I correctly predicted. After winning many many preliminary rounds which I honestly hoped I'd lose, I was smuggled into what was thought to be just another psychiatric hospital where the Russian bear took one look at me, declined to dance, and the rest is history. My delusional world always felt kind of tinny and hollow, but that never helped me get out of it. ~ Mark Vonnegut

My ancestors in this hemisphere were, by law, chattel slaves. In the U.S., they were chattel slaves for two and a half centuries - at least 10 generations. I used to think I knew what that meant. Now I realize that I can't begin to imagine the many terrible things that it must have done to them. How did they survive it all and keep their humanity? Certainly, they were never intended to keep it, just as we weren't. ~ Octavia E. Butler

People of color challenge racism everyday; we've never had a choice. Yet since we did not build, and fortify for centuries, a system of white supremacy as American as the Constitution, and as old as Plymouth Rock, we alone cannot be expected to undo it.

That, white people, is on you - and your privilege. ~ Renee Graham