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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“White people don't have that problem, they get to go through life never having to fit into a box, and it's really more so true for white men because even just being a woman, you sort of have to walk around other people's assumptions of you and it's so exhausting and there's a sense, especially among young people of wanting to just live your life, not having to wear the weight of that pressure - pressure that people of color feel, that gay people of color feel, that women of color feel.”

“White people love you, don't they? They only like me. They think I'm a dainty little china doll with bound feet, a geisha who's ready to please. But I don't talk enough for them to love me, or at least I don't talk the right way. I can't put on the whole sukiyaki-and-sayonara show they love, the chopsticks in the hair kind of mumbo jumbo, all that Suzie Wong bullshit, like every white man who comes along is William Holden or Marlon Brando, even if he looks like Mickey Rooney.”

“White people scare the crap out of me. I have never been attacked by a black person, never been evicted by a black person, never had my security deposit ripped off by a black landlord, never had a black landlord, never been pulled over by a black cop, never been sold a lemon by a black car salesman, never seen a black car salesman, never had a black person deny me a bank loan, never had a black person bury my movie, and I've never heard a black person say, 'We're going to eliminate ten thousand jobs here - have a nice day!'”

“White people's fear of Black people with guns will never cease to amaze me. Probably it's because they think about what they would do were they in our place. Especially the police, who have done so much dirt to Black people - their guilty conscience tells them to be afraid. When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.”

“White privilege allows a certain kind of leisure that can be deployed by white people of advantage toward our restoration. That's all true and good. But it also suggests that there is an individual approach to the issues that many of these white people have taken up as a recognition of their tie to and responsibility for some of the inequities that exist. And I don't think it has to be an either-or. I think it has to be a bifocal approach.”

“White privilege is the other side of racism. Unless we name it, we are in danger of wallowing in guilt or moral outrage with no idea of how to move beyond them. It is often easier to deplore racism and its effects than to take responsibility for the privileges some of us receive as a result of it... Once we understand how white privilege operates, we can begin to take steps to dismantle it on both a personal and institutional level.”

“White racists do not want to define racial hierarchy or policies that yield racial inequities as racist. To do so would be to define their ideas and policies as racist. Instead, they define policies not rigged for White people as racist. Ideas not centering White lives are racist. Beleaguered White racists who can’t imagine their lives not being the focus of any movement respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.” Embattled police officers who can’t imagine losing their right to racially profile and brutalize respond with “Blue Lives Matter.”

“White savior narratives embedded in feminist rhetoric tend to position the people who don't get out as not being worth the effort of engagement, of needing to be led toward progressive ideologies instead of understanding that the conversations that need to happen between the proverbial hood and the hills are ones between equals who have had to face different obstacles to arrive at the same destination.”

“White Slaves: Chapter Three of “The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue” There were two distinctly different ways of looking at white mulattoes–socially and physiologically. Socially, a white partus slave looked as white as any white person but was considered a black person because he or she had “one drop” of black blood from a distant black female ancestor who was a slave. Such was the case when Mr. C. was told, “That’s not a white girl; she is a nigger, sir.” Physiologically speaking, however, white partus slaves were white people because all traits of their remote black ancestry had disappeared. The North saw these white slaves as whites. The South saw these white slaves as blacks. An 1857 issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune commented on racial classification in the South. “The southern census takers, it is notorious, returned all persons as blacks who, were not more than half white. Those who possessed straight hair and Anglo-Saxon features they set down as mulattoes, many of whom were as white-skinned as their owners.” The actual number of white mulatto slaves is unknowable because all shades from “one drop” to those showing some discernible degree of black admixture were classed together as mulattoes without any distinction as to color.”

“White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. One of the best ways to instill fear in people is to terrorize them. Yet this fear is best sustained by convincing them that their bodies are ugly, their intellect is inherently underdeveloped, their culture is less civilized, and their future warrants less concern than that of other peoples.”

“White supremacists boast about white americans being superior. Let's look at it reasonably, shall we - not that you can reason with fanatics! Most of the third world speaks two or three languages, yet you say, white americans are superior! Dreamers from the third world bear ten times more difficulty to achieve their dream, yet you say, white americans are superior! Humankind's earliest scientific achievements came not from the West, but from the East and the Middle East, yet you say, America is superior - a juvenile country whose very existence is rooted in humankind's worst of atrocities. Well done! You really are superior - in cooking up fiction. The fact of the matter is, excellence has no race. And the only inferior people on earth are the ones who think of others as such.”