Reproducing Racism Quotes

I noticed that among this class of colored men the word "nigger" was freely used in about the same sense as the word "fellow," and sometimes as a term of almost endearment; but I soon learned that its use was positively and absolutely prohibited to white men. ~ James Weldon Johnson

One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell ... ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

For the rest of the earth's organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death - and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying - and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering - slowly or quickly - as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we "enjoy" as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are - hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Racism is America's greatest disease, racism is a disease of the white man. ~ Albert Einstein

My passport just identifies me; my behavior shows my real identity. ~ Rodolfo Peon

When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free - (Chapter 9). ~ Shirley Chisholm

Hating skin color is contempt for God's divine creative imagination. Honoring it is appreciation for conscious, beautiful-love-inspired diversity. ~ T.F. Hodge

As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. ~ Peggy McIntosh

Feminism is to sexism what black nationalism is to racism; the most rational response to the problem. ~ Pearl Cleage

Many fundamentalist Christian Evangelicals are racist because religion and racism are two sides of the same coin. Both are nothing more than primitive tribalism: Us vs Them thinking. That's why religious nuts and racists can so easily be manipulated into hating someone who is different from them. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody's nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal. ~ Rustin Cohle

Racism is a learned affliction and anything that is learned can be unlearned ~ Jane Elliott

Say a white boy takes a wrong turn and comes to my hood," he once said. "Now he's in the minority––nobody wants him there, unless it's to rob his ass––and more than anything he has to think about how to protect himself, how to get out. There's no weaker situation to be in than that, and this boy isn't getting anything productive done until he's out, back among his own people. But we take a wrong turn and end up at Yale, for the first time in our lives we don't have to worry about protecting ourselves. And we were all able to get enough shit done to be accepted here––so imagine what we can do when you take all the crazy hood shit out of the equation and we can just focus on the business at hand. So what if it's annoying as hell? Instead of sitting around here bitching about it, maybe we just accept that it is what it is, and know that we have the capacity to get way more from them than they'll ever get from us. ~ Jeff Hobbs

For many Native Americans across the land, the name of the Washington football team is a deeply personal reminder of a legacy of racism and generations of pain. ~ Dan Maffei

When a little black kid disappears and the media ignores it, so does the public. I know you know this. Not only that but how much media coverage a case gets has a direct relationship to how much manpower the brass assigns to solving that case. It also impacts whether or not the feds get involved. I know you know this too, dammit . . ."
". . . Lobby her on the other case at the same time, knock yourself out, but grant her an interview on Gilbert. Is that understood?"
"Loud and clear, boss. After all, we can't let a little thing like institutional racism get in our way, now, can we? ~ Mark M. Bello

Familiar words for dead black boys portrayed as complicit in their own demise. Michael Donald's body had been hanged on a Mobile street, and the police were doing the same thing to his name. ~ Ravi Howard

Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises. ~ Albert Memmi

I want to look happily forward. I want to be optimistic. I want to have a dream. I want to live in jubilee. I want my daughters to feel that they have the power to at least try to change things, even in a world that resists change with more strength than they have. I want to tell them they can overcome everything, if the are courageous, resilient and brave. Paradoxically, I also want to tell them their crowns have already been bought and paid for and that all they have to do is put them on their heads. But the world keeps tripping me up. My certainty keeps flailing. ~ Edwidge Danticat

Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and we've all been heavily sedated from it. If we don't come into consciousness of this tragedy, there's going to be a violent awakening we don't want. The question is, can we wake up? ~ Anna Deavere Smith

Your species is one filled with judgement and the desire to hate. The only reason racism, sexism and all the other prejudices which you had came to a crashing end, is that you collectively found someone else to hate. Someone more 'other' thatn all of you combined. Suddenly it wasn't white people and black people, or straight people and gay people, suddenly all that mattered were people against non-people. ~ James Fahy

In any case, it is difficult not to think that if Serena lost context by abandoning all rules of civility, it could be because her body, trapped in a racial imaginary, trapped in disbelief - code for being black in America - is being governed not by the tennis match she is participating in but by a collapsed relationship that had promised to play by the rules. Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context - randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out "I swear to God!" is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship. Two ~ Claudia Rankine

In the coming years, we will hear, again, that anger is a destructive force, to be controlled. Watch carefully, because not everyone is asked to do this in equal measure. ~ Soraya Chemaly

The nation as it is currently constituted has never dealt with a yesterday or tomorrow where we were radically honest, generous, and tender with each other. ~ Kiese Laymon

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

Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy? ~ Joseph Brodsky

I think the best way I could ever fight racism is just being as successful as possible. ~ Lilly Singh

I often say never write about white people. Not many people realize what I mean by this. Its pretty simple. Some may think its unrealistic to have an ethnically diverse cast but its ten times more unrealistic to see a cast of only white people. Like I don't know where you've grown up but the world isn't that way, at least not if your reading this post in English. ~ Adam Snowflake

How could the eagle-eyed politicians of The Hague, who specialized in pointing out the tiniest specks in other people's eyes, overlook someone riding a racist coach in their own neighborhood? ~ Dauglas Dauglas

No human is responsible for a wrong deed. The fault lies in the entire society, because underneath this wrong deed there are other wrong deeds against the human that did the wrong deed. If the society was fair, no wrong at all would have occurred. ~ Maria Karvouni

I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust ... We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better. ~ Thurgood Marshall

Hilly raises her voice about three octaves higher when she talks to coloured people. Elizabeth smiles like she's talking to a child, although certainly not her own. I am starting to notice things. ~ Kathryn Stockett

Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Joblessness is a weapon of mass destruction, homelessness, a weapon of mass destruction ... racism, a weapon of mass destruction, fear, a weapon of mass destruction. We must disarm these weapons and renew our commitment to quality public schools and dedicated teachers and good housing and quality health care and decent jobs and stronger neighborhoods. ~ Dennis Kucinich