Racial Reconciliation Quotes

I came to realize that this was about more than not offering up what some of his opponents craved - the picture of the angry black man, or the lectures on race that fuel a sense of grievance among white voters. Obama also didn't want to offer up gauzy words to make well-meaning white people feel better. The fact that he was a black president wasn't going to bring life back to an unarmed black kid who was shot, or alter structural inequities in housing, education, and incarceration in our states and cities. It wasn't going to change the investment of powerful interests in a system that sought to deny voting rights, or to cast people on food stamps working minimum wage jobs as "takers," incapable of making it on their own. The "last person who ever thought that Barack Obama's election was going to bring racial reconciliation and some "end of race" in America was Barack Obama. That was a white person's concept imposed upon his campaign. I know because I was once one of them, taking delight in writing words about American progress, concluding in the applause line "And that is why I can stand before you as president of the United States." But he couldn't offer up absolution for America's racial sins, or transform American society in four or eight years. ~ Ben Rhodes

Every aspect of the way God views and saves sinners is designed to undermine racism and lead to a reconciled and redeemed humanity from every people group in the world. ~ John Piper

To put it bluntly, much of what passes for racial reconciliation among Christians is merely an exercise in making sure Black men and other men of color have the same access to male privilege as their White counterparts do. ~ Chanequa Walker-Barnes

The tendency to view the holistic work of the church as the action of the privileged toward the marginalized often derails the work of true community healing. Ministry in the urban context, acts of justice and racial reconciliation require a deeper engagement with the other - an engagement that acknowledges suffering rather than glossing over it. ~ Soong-Chan Rah

For Christians engaged in racial reconciliation, in particular, solidarity is based upon our shared identity as followers of Christ who are bound together through our baptismal covenant. Thus, our solidarity must be evinced by what Duane Bidwell identifies as the characteristics of "helpful and healthful covenant partnerships": (1) relational justice (the sharing of power, opportunity, and rewards); (2) equal regard (an ethic of interdependent mutuality in which partners empathize with and seek the flourishing of one another); (3) mutual empowerment (the capacity to influence and be influenced by others without domination or losing one's identity); (4) respect for embodiment (honoring the body of the other, including their lived realities, as a reliable and trustworthy informant about them, the world, and the Divine); (5) and resistance to colonization (working to prevent and dismantle the internalization of harmful cultural beliefs). ~ Chanequa Walker-Barnes

Any racial reconciliation we've had in this country has come not out of confrontation but out of a spirit of reconciliation. If we continue to practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we'll eventually end up with a land of people who are blind and toothless. ~ Andrew Young

We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here. Our failure to confront the historical truth about how African Americans finally won their freedom presents a major obstacle to genuine racial reconciliation. ~ Timothy B. Tyson

White America's trust in the system and related belief in its own merit pose a frequent roadblock in racial reconciliation. Many Whites in these settings are fine with discussing White supremacy as an abstract principle, or a historical artifact, or even as an ongoing reality in the lives of people of color. But they are highly resistant to examining their own privilege or to the suggestion that any element of their success may be the product of racial privilege. ~ Chanequa Walker-Barnes

A recent example of the racial reconciliation paradigm at work is the #AllLivesMatter retort. In an interview in The New York Times, philosopher Judith Butler unpacked the problem: If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, "all lives matter," then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of "all lives." That said, it is true that all lives matter (we can then debate about when life begins or ends). But to make that universal formulation concrete, to make that into a living formulation, one that truly extends to all people, we have to foreground those lives that are not mattering now, to mark that exclusion, and militate against it.113 ~ Robert P. Jones

Racial discrimination does not always violate public policy. ~ Trent Lott

When the war came to this tragic end for Germany, I had to first say goodbye to my only great passion in this life and I decided, based on my living experience, to undertake the reorganisation of a new German racial corpus. I say "body of the people", already something different from what many other German politicians had in mind. The bourgeois politicians only saw the State before their eyes, I saw the people, the substance. For me, the State was nothing more than a purely exterior, even a compulsory form. I had then already come to see that that which we call the State is, in reality, the overcoming of the inborn individualistic self-drive in people - that one can't start anything with the State, especially in reorganising, rather that the "body of the people" was the primary and decisive thing, that the body of the people must therefore be reorganised. ~ Adolf Hitler

Hope for a future … free from oppression and injustice, when a new humanity includes all peoples, languages, tribes, and nations - now exists in the realm of mystery. Only the mystics see and experience it in its fullness. ~ Curtiss Paul DeYoung

People may say . . . that all is made up and well again, but such breaches between great people are seldom or never so. ~ Anne Somerset

Words evolve, perhaps more rapidly and tellingly than do their users, and the change in meanings reflects a society often more accurately than do the works of many historians. In he years preceding the first collapse of NorAm, the change in the meaning of one word predicted the failure of that society more immediately and accurately than did all the analysts, social scientists, and historians. That critical word? 'Discrimination.' We know it now as a term meaning 'unfounded bias against a person, group, or culture on the basis of racial, gender, or ethnic background.' Prejudice, if you will.

The previous meaning of this word was: 'to draw a clear distinction between good and evil, to differentiate, to recognize as different.' Moreover, the connotations once associated with discrimination were favorable. A person of discrimination was one of taste and good judgment. With the change of the meaning into a negative term of bias, the English language was left without a single-word term for the act of choosing between alternatives wisely, and more importantly, left with a subterranean negative connotation for those who attempted to make such choices.

In hindsight, the change in meaning clearly reflected and foreshadowed the disaster to come. Individuals and institutions abhorred making real choices. At one point more than three-quarters of the youthful population entered institutions of higher learning. Credentials, often paper ones, replaced meaning judgment ~ L.E. Modesitt Jr.

The genius of the biblical story is what it tells us about God himself: a God who sacrifices himself in death out of love for his enemies; a God who would rather experience the death we deserved than to be apart from the people he created for his pleasure; a God who himself bore our likeness, experienced our creatureliness, and carried our sins so that he might provide pardon and reconciliation; a God who would not let us go, but who would pursue us - all of us, even the worst of us - so that he might restore us into joyful fellowship with himself; a God who in Christ Jesus has so forever identified with his beloved creatures that he came to be known and praised as "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Pet 1:3). ~ Gordon D. Fee

Our political discourse has degenerated into anxieties about whether giving benefits to those people over there will take money out of the pockets of my kind of people over here, even when the changes are those from which we would all benefit."

"The church is one of the few remaining institutions in the American scene that normalizes the effects of slavery, with most Christians preserving these segregated spaces in the interests of cultural comfort. Racially separate churches violate the interdependence that should characterize authentic Christian communities. Further, this individualism blocks churches from the blessings of gifts preserved in separate traditions. For example, segregated white churches celebrate the confessions and the rich legacies of the intellectual giants of the faith, but too often preach a weak and disembodied gospel that reduces spirituality to symbolism, and that separates material concerns from moral choices and the pursuit of righteousness."

"Indeed, we have reached a sad state of affairs when we are all unwilling to be challenged when we go to church."


"We should not move too quickly to a cheap reconciliation that forgets the past rather than honoring it as a clay vessel that contains a refined treasure bearing witness to the presence of Jesus at the margins. We need to make space for the histories of ethnic pain to be shared and revered among whites and all peoples of color, and to be instructed by them. Tha ~ Love L. Sechrest

The sciences that purport to treat of human things
the new scientific storyings of the social, the political, the racial or ethnic, and the psychic, nature of human beings
treat not of human things but mere things, things that make up the physical, or circumstantial, content of human life but are not of the stuff of humanity, have not the human essence in them. ~ Laura Riding

I longed that those who, I have reason to think, owe me ill will, might be eternally happy. It seemed refreshing to think of meeting them in heaven, how much soever they had injured me on earth: had no disposition to insist upon any confession from them, in order to reconciliation, and the exercise of love and kindness to them. Oh! it is an emblem of heaven itself, to love all the world with a love of kindness, forgiveness, and benevolence ... ~ David Brainerd

Curing America's racial pathology couldn't be done with good intentions or presidential elections. ~ Mat Johnson

I traveled from city to city in those days, and the view from within the ghettos was terrible and terrifying. While white people in the periphery were arming themselves against the day when they would have to defend themselves from attack by blacks (and really believed someone was fomenting a racial war in which black people would rise up and attack them), black people mostly without arms huddled inside the ghettos feeling that they were surrounded by armed whites. ~ John Howard Griffin

I believe that the racial injustice which existed such a short time ago probably would have persisted longer if the color barrier had not been broken in baseball. ~ Harrison Ford

But before we cue the brass section to blare "The Stars and Stripes Forever," it might be worth taking another moment of melancholy silence to mourn the thwarted reconciliation with the mother country and what might have been. Anyone who accepts the patriots' premise that all men are created equal must come to terms with the fact that the most obvious threat to equality in eighteenth-century North America was not taxation without representation but slavery. Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1776 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, a generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, "This is your Fourth of July, not mine. ~ Sarah Vowell

The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? ~ David Horowitz

The world is desperately in need of people who will break themselves open and pour themselves out for the reconciliation of all things- that's what the world needs. ~ Rob Bell

When generalizations turn into painful cultural stereotypes and biases, those biased narratives disrupt our ability to see each event as individual, which interrupts our ability to intelligently and compassionately respond to what's happening now. In many cases, our generalizations cause real harm, like somebody shooting a person who looks "suspicious" because he fits a racial profile. Generalization is what leads to oppression. Deconstructing our generalizations is the only way to overcome bias. This is where studying emptiness is intended to lead us - toward the cessation of prejudice. ~ Ethan Nichtern

When I played, I received racial abuse but I was just one of a few black players and we weren't backed up by the authorities. ~ Ruud Gullit

BMX riding breaks down racial perceptions. Coming from New York City and being a BMX rider, that isn't something that's too common. I feel like for the longest time, I would ride through certain neighborhoods and people would call me a "white boy" because they associated white boys from California with BMX riding, and it bugs me so much because I'm completely not that. I completely don't fit that mold. It's really important for me to bring BMX riding to the masses and show people exactly what it is. ~ Nigel Sylvester

All Americans are the prisoners of racial prejudice. ~ Shirley Chisholm

In the last twelve years, we have come some distance towards reconciliation and the breaking down of disadvantage. Let us take encouragement from what has been achieved and set our minds and hearts to end the remaining roadblocks. ~ Malcolm Fraser

The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. ~ Adolf Hitler

In the leadup to the election of 1876, swing votes were tied to the issue of Chinese immigration in the same way that immigration was a hot topic during this election cycle. Rutherford Hayes endorsed Chinese exclusion and won the election. In the following election, James Garfield also carried the torch of anti-Chinese immigration into office. (From those days to now, every presidential election has fanned the flames of anti-immigration. This, Henry, shows that hate and fear are reliable, predictable, and effective political tools.) All of this led eventually to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred the entry of all Chinese immigrants to the United States except for those who were teachers, students, diplomats, ministers, or merchants. It also declared all Chinese totally ineligible for naturalized citizenship. This clause alone allowed the United States to join Nazi Germany and South Africa as the only nations every to withhold naturalization purely on racial grounds. ~ Lisa See

I had worked for a number of organizations that struggled to create meaningful opportunities for people of color, but I had never heard anyone make an overt case in favor of assimilation - particularly at an organization that promoted diversity in its mission statements and messaging. Granted, many people of color on our team had grown suspicious of those statements, suspecting that the organization wanted our racial diversity without our diversity of thought and culture. ~ Austin Channing Brown

Laurie piped up again. 'At State, everybody calls diversity dispersity. What happens is, everybody has their own clubs, their own signs, their own sections where they all sit in the dining hall--all the African Americans are over there? . . . and all the Asians sit over't these other tables? -- except for the Koreans? -- because they don't get along with the Japanese so they sit way over there? Everybody's dispersed into their own little groups -- and everybody's told to distrust everybody else? Everybody's told that everybody else is trying to screw them over--oops!' -- Laurie pulled a face and put her fingertips over her lips -- 'I'm sorry!' She rolled eyes and smiled. 'Anyway, the idea is, every other group is like prejudiced against your group, and no matter what they say, they're only out to take advantage of you, and you should have nothing to do with them -- unless your white, in which case all the others are not prejudiced against you, they're like totally right, because you really are a racist and everything, even if you don't know it? Everybody ends up dispersed into their own like turtle shells, suspicious of everybody else and being careful not to fraternize with them. Is it like that at Dupont? ~ Tom Wolfe

I must tell you that I am committed, as the president of Iraq, to benchmarks and to do our best to achieve some progress forward for national reconciliation. ~ Jalal Talabani

If you are not drawing fire from both Pharisees and Sadducees, you are probably saying something other than what Jesus said. And if your message is not drawing both tax collectors (Roman collaborators) and zealots (anti-Roman insurrectionists) to repentance, you are probably speaking with a different voice than does he. Jesus wasn't inconsistent. He saw the Roman Empire, despite all its pretensions to preeminence both in its own mind and in the mind of its opponents, as a temporary obstacle, not the defining point of his agenda. We stand and we speak, with reconciliation in view. We see, therefore, even our most passionate critic not as an argument to be vaporized but as a neighbor to be evangelized. This doesn't mean that we back down one iota from the truth. But we proclaim the whole gospel of truth and grace, never backing down from either. That means taking seriously the arguments of our opponents, not merely caricatures of those arguments. ~ Russell D. Moore

I am afraid the church is trying to speak out on too many issues that really do not concern the church. There are certain issues we know to be wrong - racial injustice, crime, gambling, dishonesty, pornography. On these matters we must thunder forth as the prophets of God. ~ Billy Graham

And this is why I have concluded that although every racial, ethnic, and religious group in the United States claims to want a piece of the American dream, there is no group that apologizes more for its success than black people. ~ Lawrence Otis Graham

Don't forget that in the midst of all your pain and heartache, you are surrounded by beauty, the wonder of creation, art, your music and culture, the sounds of laughter and love, of whispered hopes and celebrations, of new life and transformation, of reconciliation and forgiveness. ~ Wm. Paul Young

There's always that one thing, right? A particular action that is your own personal line in the sand. The nuclear threat you keep in your back pocket, never even mentioning it because it will escalate any conflict beyond the chance of reconciliation.
And yet, here I was, declaring war, turning that line in the sand into a mere dot in the distance behind me. ~ Stacey Kade

Man has but little heeded the advice of the wise men. He has been - fatefully, if not willingly - less virtuous, less constant, less rational, less peaceful than he knows how to be, than he is fully capable of being. He has been led astray from the ways of peace and brotherhood by his addiction to concepts and attitudes of narrow nationalism, racial and religious bigotry, greed and lust for power. ~ Ralph Bunche

It is absolutely no accident that the peace and reconciliation, and indeed the economic progress, that eluded us generation after generation for hundreds of years, has at last come to pass in an Ireland where the talents of women are now flooding every aspect of life as never before. ~ Mary McAleese

I am not a member of a racial minority, and I am well aware of the reality that far too many individuals of color are harassed by officers for no good reason, so it is easier for me to give the above advice than for others who have been subject to such harassment. After all, I have never been stopped by a police officer who thought I was riding a bike that looked like it might be too expensive for somebody of my race. And I cannot imagine how frustrating such prejudicial suspicion must be. But you cannot make your situation any better by refusing to cooperate with the officer, no matter how unreasonable you may think the police officer is being, or by refusing to disclose two simple things: (1) your name, and (2) whether you have some lawful reason for your curious presence or conduct at that moment at some place where the officer already knows you are, because he or she is standing right there with you. Those ~ James Duane

The message of reconciliation, of nation-building, of granting amnesty, indemnity, has struck a powerful, favorable chord. And people can understand that we're here not for purposes of retribution but to forget the past and to build our country. ~ Nelson Mandela

The man who has lost his instincts and does not recognize the obligation Nature has given him cannot hope for any corrective action on Nature's part until he restores his lost instincts by clear intellectual awareness. Once he understands, then he must face the task of making the necessary amends by bringing back what was lost. There is a great danger that once a man no longer sees his duty clearly, he will continue to tear down the racial barriers until the last remaining shred of his best part is finally lost. Then there would be nothing left but a uniform racial mush, which appears to be the ideal sought by our "wonderful world-reformers" today. However this puree mix would soon drive all ideals from the world. True, a group of great size might be formed in that way because a herd animal can be unnaturally combined, but no such mixture can ever produce a man who can carry a culture or a man who can be a cultural founder and creator. The mission of mankind could then be considered at an end.
Anyone who does not want the earth to approach that condition must accept that it is the task, especially of the German State, to be sure, above everything, that all further bastardization is stopped. ~ Adolf Hitler

The Southern strategy of the Nixon administration is based upon the same principle as the Compromise of 1876: namely, that Northern Republicans and Southern conservatives share common interests and together can rule this nation. I do not think it is possible to condemn too harshly what the President has done in the South in order to form this alliance. Indeed, I can think of no recent President who has more blatantly sacrificed the ideals of equality and racial justice for his own political ends. Nor is Nixon simply riding the wave of reaction. He is encouraging that reaction, for he knows that he became President because of divisions in the society, and that it is in his interest that these divisions grow wider. ~ Bayard Rustin

The time has come for women and men to band together to jointly create gender harmony. We must gather in mixed group to plumb new depths of relational awareness, courageous truth-telling, compassionate listening, empathic sensitivity, and mutual healing. ~ William Keepin

In '42,' it's like the '40s where racial equality had come into the consciousness of a lot of people, whereas in the 1900s it was sort of a new thing. ~ Andre Holland

Black women who date or marry white men find that they cannot endure the harassment and persecution by black and white people. In some instances black men who are themselves involved in inter-racial relationships act contemptuously towards black women who exercise the same freedom of choice. They see their own behavior as acceptable because they view white women as victims, while they see white men as oppressors. So in their eyes a black woman involved with a white man is allying herself with a racist oppressor. But their tendency to see white women as innocent, as non-racist is yet another reflection of their acceptance of sexist idealization of woman. For white women have historically shown themselves to be as capable of being racist oppressors as white men. ~ Bell Hooks

Socially, hip-hop has done more for racial camaraderie in this country than any one thing. 'Cause guys like me, my kids - everyone under 45 either grew up loving hip-hop or hating hip-hop, but everyone under 45 grew up very aware of hip-hop. So when you're a white kid and you're listening to this music and you're being exposed to it every day on MTV, black people become less frightening. This is just a reality. What hip-hop has done bringing people together is enormous. ~ Michael Rapaport

our democracy is controlled by a wealthy elite. Politicians who work for the wealthy need the police to protect them from the people. And so the whole chain of command protects the killer cop. The ruling class give carte blanche to law enforcement, who in turn press down on those most stranded by the neoliberal state, the poor-- and more so, the Black poor."
-- Nicolas Powers ~ Maya Schenwar

Reconciliation is what takes place, of course, at higher levels. President Karzai has been very clear about the red lines for reconciliation, accept the constitution, lay down their weapons, cut their ties with al Qaeda and essentially become productive or at least participating members of society in that regard. ~ David Petraeus

Immigration today is a racial issue. It is one which sees masses of non-whites from around the globe immigrating to white countries. ~ Arthur Kemp

Oppression Olympics is what smart liberal Americans say to make you feel stupid and to make you shut up. But there IS an oppression olympics going on. American racial minorities - blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Jews - all get shit from white folks, different kinds of shit but shit still. Each secretly believes that it gets the worst shit. So, no, there is no United League of the Oppressed. However, all the others think they're better than blacks because, well, they're not black. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We seek to create a united Democratic and non-racial society. ~ Oliver Tambo

Zen doesn't believe in the reconciliation of opposites because from the point of view of Zen, there is no point of view. ~ Frederick Lenz

Locating friendship at the heart of mission involves certain assumptions
that reconciliation with God is something for which every human being is made and relationships are reciprocal. ~ Christopher Heuertz

No man was more sensitive than Zweig to the destructive effects upon individual liberty of the demands of large or strident collectivities. He would have viewed with horror the cacophony of monomanias - sexual, racial, social, egalitarian - that marks the intellectual life of our societies, each monomaniac demanding legislative restriction on the freedom of others in the name of a supposed greater, collective good. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

We must not only speak about forgiveness and reconciliation, we must act on these principles. ~ Desmond Tutu