Dismantling Racism Quotes

Looking out the window, Moist saw a small swarm of goblins leave the train and at first he thought, ha! Trust the buggers to run away, and then he mentally corrected himself: that was storybook thinking and with clearer eyesight and a bit of understanding he realized that the goblins were scrambling up to the delvers on the rocks and beating the shit out of them by diving into the multiple layers of dwarf clothing. The delvers discovered all too rapidly that trying to fight while a busy goblin was in your underwear was very bad for the concentration. ~ Terry Pratchett

Many humans make the mistake of fighting for race when it's the species driving our genes. And there is only one weapon to fight for species: the brain. ~ Anthony Marais

The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

For many Washington liberals, terrorism was not the instrument of political fanatics and evil men, but was the product of social conditions - poverty, racism and oppression - for which the Western democracies, including Israel were always ultimately to blame. ~ David Horowitz

But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response? ~ Robert Kennedy

The world seems to be witnessing a deluge of 'haterisms', and racist propaganda because evil's pain was born to die, and it's time of tyranny is near the end. Don't get caught up by the souls of wickedness; this ain't your fight. ~T.F. Hodge ~ T.F. Hodge

The thing about the black market is, it's racist. White children make useful slaves, too. ~ M.C. Humphreys

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

The human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty. ~ Eduardo Galeano

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. ~ Audre Lorde

Look, what I'm saying is, you're the leader, right? So you got to act like you know what you're doing, okay? If the leader doesn't know what he's doing, no one else does, either."

"I only know what I'm doing when I'm dismantling traps," said Darktan.

"All right, think of the future as a great big trap," said Sardines. "With no cheese. ~ Terry Pratchett

The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world. ~ Michelle Alexander

Systems do not maintain themselves; even our lack of intervention is an act of maintenance. Every structure in every society is upheld by the active and passive assistance of other human beings. ~ Sonya Renee Taylor

One would expect Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, who is said to have studied history, to know better and act better, but he too rejects all advice and criticism and runs around obliviously in a coach plastered with pictures of his grandmother abusing her captives, including women and children. You might imagine the bigoted Donald Trump to be riding a coach like that in a mock presidential parade in his dreams, but certainly not a twenty first century Dutch royal. I wonder if he ever considered how their Calvinist pomposity affected the psyche of black and white children. ~ Dauglas Dauglas

I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division say, of men into "us" (Westerners) and "they" (Orientals). For such divisions are generalities whose use historically and actually has been to press the importance of the distinction between some men and some other men, usually towards not especially admirable ends. ~ Edward W. Said

When you look at the Justice Department's report talking about the Ferguson Police Department's rampant pattern of discrimination and its excessive use of force against African-American citizens, it's hard to try to rationalize how this cesspool of racism doesn't spill over onto the individual officers. ~ Benjamin Crump

If we speak of an angry God at all, we will speak of a God angry at indifference, angry at apathy, angry at racism and violence, angry at inhumanity, angry at waste, angry at destruction, angry at injustice, angry at hostile religious clannishness. That anger is never against us (or them); it is against what is against us (and them). ~ Brian D. McLaren

PROGRESSIVISM = EUGENICS: Centrally Planned economies tempt population control. ~ A.E. Samaan

The victims of right-wing violence are typically immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, while the targets of environmental and animal rights activism are among "the most powerful corporations on the planet" - hence the state's relative indifference to the one and obsession with the other.

The broader pattern helps to explain one partial exception to the left/right gap in official scrutiny - namely, the domestic aspects of the "War on Terror." Al Qaeda is clearly a reactionary organization. Like much of the American far right, it is theocratic, anti-Semitic, and patriarchal. Like Timothy McVeigh, the 9/11 hijackers attacked symbols of institutional power, killing a great many innocent people to further their cause. But while the state's bias favors the right over the left, the Islamists were the wrong kind of right-wing fanatic. These right-wing terrorists were foreigners, they were Muslim, and above all they were not white. And so, in retrospect and by comparison, the state's response to the Oklahoma City bombing seems relatively restrained - short-lived, focused, selectively targeting unlawful behavior for prosecution. The government's reaction to the September 11th attacks has been something else entirely - an open-ended war fought at home and abroad, using all variety of legal, illegal, and extra-legal military, police, and intelligence tactics, arbitrarily jailing large numbers of people and spying on entire communities of immigrants, Muslims, and Middle ~ Kristian Williams

One day blacks and whites will come together like the keys of a piano, and be as beautiful as the it makes ~ O. S. Hickman

I'm in favor of everything with regards to ending institutional racism. ~ Rand Paul

Liberal Christianity, of course, has enemies, but they are everyone's enemies - sexism, racism, homophobia. But liberal versions of Christianity, which can be both theologically and politically conservative, assume that what it means to be Christian qua Christian is to have no enemies peculiar to being Christian. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

This emphasis is directed primarily at the here and now, as Christ-embodying communities of active love in the midst of the world. All of creation is caught up in the restorative work. The mission of God's people is not simply directed at saving people's souls from a bad life-after-death into a good life-after-death, but it addresses and hopefully touches the injustice and violence around us - poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, environmental destruction - where salvation, justice, and peace can merge. ~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci

What history had I inherited that left me an alien in my place of birth? ~ Reni Eddo-Lodge

The systematic dismantling of reproductive rights, much like the takedown of collective bargaining, has been taking place in full view. ~ Garry Trudeau

Perhaps the strongest indictment against us as the Church is that we have settled for an Americanized version of the Church that mirrors whatever culture says, and there is no collective sense of loss, no sense of remorse. We have sinned deeply. The problem is that we haven't got a taste of the sinfulness of racism... We don't see the wickedness of profiling God's people that He has created to be one and that He has created in His image (p. 75). ~ John M. Perkins

I think what I came through is great, but my son can take it to another level, not having to fight racism. His mother's a Norwegian and I'm mixed up four or five times, so he can face the world. ~ James Brown

Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline. ~ Christopher Hitchens

At the zoo, I stood in front of the primate cage listening to a woman marvel at how "presidential" the four-hundred-pound gorilla looked sitting astride a shorn oaken limb, keeping a watchful eye over his caged brood. When her boyfriend, his finger tapping the informational placard, pointed out the "presidential" silverback's name coincidentally was Baraka, the woman laughed aloud, until she saw me, the other four-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, stuffing something that might have been the last of a Big Stick Popsicle or a Chiquita banana in my mouth. ~ Paul Beatty

Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience. ~ David Foster Wallace

Listening to the debates about public schools on the Christian Right, one hears plenty of opposing opinions and a great deal of confusion. Some want to change the schools, others want to leave them. But the smart money seems to know what it is doing. It provides support for programs like the Good News Club, which slowly erode the support for public education in the country at large and in their own constituency in particular. And then it lays the groundwork for dismantling public education in favor of a private system of religious education funded by the state. ~ Katherine Stewart

True confession: The reason we don't talk about race is because we do not speak a common language. ~ Jodi Picoult

When it comes to people… you could aptly say that I am a racist… a human racist. I believe in people. There are good and not-so-good people of all colors and creeds. I'm not here to judge. Period. As people, we draw judgments from others when we behave badly, especially when we try to blame our bad behavior on others. This is not based on race, age, sex, or religion. It's based on behavior differences. ~ Cathy Burnham Martin

The book, 'Citizen,' begins with daily encounters, little moments, places where language reveals how racism determines how we interact. ~ Claudia Rankine

When you're marginalized, there are no "them people," if we're all on the outskirts of the same margin. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

I've been a lawyer in Detroit for a lot of years. I've seen the system up close and personal. I've seen the charging differences, the sentencing differences, blacks in white towns harassed and pulled over for the crime of simply being there and being black. ~ Mark M. Bello

We're genetically predisposed toward certain behaviors that we've collectively decided are unhelpful; adultery and racism are possible examples. With reasonable success, we mitigate those impulses through civil codes, religious rituals, maternal warnings - the whole bag of tricks we call culture. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

When we fail to open the closed-minded consumers of racist ideas, we blame their closed-mindedness instead of our foolish decision to waste time reviving closed minds from the dead. When our vicious attacks on open-minded consumers of racist ideas fail to transform them, we blame their hate rather than our impatient and alienating hate of them. When people fail to consume our convoluted antiracist ideas, we blame their stupidity rather than our stupid lack of clarity. When we transform people and do not show them an avenue of support, we blame their lack of commitment rather than our lack of guidance. When the politician we supported does not change racist policy, we blame the intractability of racism rather than our support of the wrong politician. When we fail to gain support for a protest, we blame the fearful rather than our alienating presentation. When the protest fails, we blame racist power rather than our flawed protest. When our policy does not produce racial equity, we blame the people for not taking advantage of the new opportunity, not our flawed policy solution. The failure doctrine avoids the mirror of self-blame. The failure doctrine begets failure. The failure doctrine begets racism. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

For the history of the American Negro is unique also in this: that the question of his humanity, and of his rights therefore as a human being, became a burning one for several generations of Americans, so burning a question that it ultimately became one of those used to divide the nation. ~ James Baldwin

I know that no matter how liberal or progressive I profess to be, no matter how successfully, how diligently I seek to be enlightened and nuanced in my understanding of the world and those around me, I know that there still is a tiny, virulent nugget, a germ of prejudice that exists deep within me - the product of those stereotypes and awful jokes of childhood and adolescence, and that it must always be powerfully held at bay by reason, understanding and love. ~ Michael Winship

Those who speak of harmony and consensus should beware of what one might call the industrial chaplain view of reality. The idea, roughly speaking, is that there are greedy bosses on one side and belligerent workers on the other, while in the middle, as the very incarnation of reason, equity and moderation, stands the decent, soft-spoken, liberal-minded chaplain who tries selflessly to bring the two warring parties together. But why should the middle always be the most sensible place to stand? Why do we tend to see ourselves as in the middle and other people as on the extremes? After all, one person's moderation is another's extremism. People don't go around calling themselves a fanatic, any more than they go around calling themselves Pimply. Would one also seek to reconcile slaves and slave masters, or persuade native peoples to complain only moderately about those who are plotting their extermination? What is the middle ground between racism and anti-racism? ~ Terry Eagleton

It's alive and well everywhere. Native Americans get a lot of crap in the West and south west. Muslims get treated like crap in just about every country in the Western world lately. Black people are mistreated in some parts of the US still. There are black people who are racist against white people. I've recently encountered someone who decided they couldn't tolerate my presence because I'm catholic, which according them makes me a pedophile, Satan worshipper and a whore.

I've even encountered discrimination from people over seas for being American. Especially with my cousin's friends from England. They were rude to me the entire visit. They thought that I had to be an ignorant, xenophobic, racist slob just because I was from America and they spent most of the time trying to pick a fight with me to prove it.

Racism exists, but don't take the comments you read online seriously. A good 80-90% of those are trolls looking for attention or a bored teenager who thinks it's funny to be an idiot. ~ Kathryn Stockett

White privilege is a manipulative, suffocating blanket of power that envelops everything we know...It's brutal and oppressive, bullying you into not speaking up for fear of losing your loved ones, or job, or flat. It scares you into silencing yourself: you don't get the privilege of speaking honestly about your feelings without extensively assessing the consequences...challenging it can have implications on your quality of life. ~ Reni Eddo-Lodge

We are indeed a house divided. But the division between race and race, class and class, will not be dissolved by massive infusions of brotherly sentiment. The division is not the result of bad sentiment, and therefore will not be healed by rhetoric. Rather the division and the bad sentiments are both reflections of vast and growing inequalities in our socioeconomic system--inequalities of wealth, of status, of education, of access to political power. Talk of brotherhood and "tolerance" (are we merely to "tolerate" one another?) might once have had a cooling effect, but increasingly it grates on the nerves. It evokes contempt not because the values of brotherhood are wrong--they are more important than ever--but because it just does not correspond to the reality we see around us. And such talk does nothing to eliminate the inequalities that breed resentment and deep discontent. ~ Bayard Rustin

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however ofter Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs. ~ George Orwell

All social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have been tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn. The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions, by which one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of a universally stigmatised injustice and tyranny. So it has been with the distinctions of slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and plebeians; and so it will be, and in part already is, with the aristocracies of colour, race, and sex. ~ John Stuart Mill

I am disappointed that after all of the struggles that we have had in this country for such a long time, trying to get through and beyond racism and bigotry and discrimination - I think it is sad. It just tells us the kind of work that we have to do as - as America, as a nation. ~ Bernie Sanders

One of the funny things about the racism of the system, when I started 30 years ago, I'm in an area called Koreatown and most of the kids were Asian. And when the kids did well, people said, "Well, of course, they did well. They're Asians." But when we had this huge influx of Latino children from Central America, they said, "Oh, you're gonna have problems now." ~ Rafe Esquith