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Blacks Quotes

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Blacks Quotes

“Economic and social deprivation, if accepted by its victims as their lot in life, breeds passivity, even docility. The miserable yield to their fate as divinely ordained or as their own fault. And, indeed, many Negroes in earlier generations felt that way. Today young Negroes aren't having any of this. They don't share the feeling that something must be wrong with them, that they are responsible for their own exclusion from this affluent society. The civil rights movement--in fact, the whole liberal trend beginning with John Kennedy's election--has told them otherwise. These young Negroes are right. The promises made to them were good and necessary and long, long overdue. The youth were right to believe in them. The only trouble is that the promises were not fulfilled.”

EqualityCivil RightsInequalityAfrican AmericansBlacksPromises
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“As the civil rights movement progressed, winning victory after victory in public accommodations and voting rights, it became increasingly conscious that these victories would not be secure or far-reaching without a radical improvement in the Negro's socioeconomic position. And so the movement reached out of the South into the urban centers of the North and the West. It moved from public accommodations to employment, welfare, housing, education--to find a host of problems the nation had let fester for a generation. But these were not problems that affected the Negro alone or that could be solved easily with the movement's traditional protest tactics. These injustices were imbedded not in ancient and obsolete institutional arrangements but in the priorities of powerful vested interests, in the direction of public policy, in the allocation of our national resources. Sit-ins could integrate a lunch counter, but massive social investments and imaginative public policies were required to eliminate the deeper inequalities.”

RaceRacismEqualityCivil RightsInequalityAfrican AmericansBlacksCivil Rights Movement
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“Being in servitude to the Anglo-Saxon race, I was not put into a "Jim Crow car," on our way to Rockaway, neither was I invited to ride through the streets on the top of trunks in a truck; but every where I found the same manifestations of that cruel prejudice, which so discourages the feelings, and represses the energies of the colored people.”

PrejudiceSlaveryInequalityAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationJim CrowSlaves
Book:Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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“The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.”

BlackFeminismRacismBlack WomenAfrican AmericansBlacksI Know Why The Caged Bird SingsWomen Of ColorMaya AngelouMasculity
Book:I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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“This is the ultimate tragedy of segregation. It not only harms one physically but injures one spiritually. It scars the soul and degrades the personality. It inflicts the segregated with a false sense of inferiority, while confirming the segregator in a false estimate of his own superiority.”

RacePsychologySuperiorityAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationRace RelationsInferiorityWhites
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors.”

RaceRacismReflectionGuiltThoughtAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesThoughtfulness
Book:Notes of a Native Son
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“Contrary moods of violence, withdrawal, separatism, and nationalism conform to a theory of black history that Rustin has developed, a theory that makes a great deal of sense to anyone familiar with the story of the black man in white America, especially the post-slavery part of the story. It is a cyclical theory. The model of the cycle begins with an upsurge of of hopes and expectations inspired by bold promises and commitments. This is followed by a phase of disappointed hopes and betrayed promises, which is followed in turn by frustration, despair, withdrawal, and separatism of one variety or another. Each phase produces leaders and doctrines that accommodate the accompanying mood. The third phase takes many forms, but some of them invariably attract support from reactionary elements of white society.”

HopeRacismBetrayalCivil RightsCyclesAfrican AmericansBlacksBlack HistoryRacial DiscriminationSeparatism
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“Oona's mother was active online, and listened to the radio, and watched the news, and she had come to believe she was on the inside, among the elect, those who understood the plot, the plot her daughter said was ridiculous, a plot that had been building for years, for decades, maybe for centuries, the plot against their kind, yes their kind, no matter what her daughter said, for they had a kind, the only people who could not call themselves a people in this country, and there were not so many of them left, and now it had arrived, and was upon them, and she was afraid, for what could she do, but there were those among them who would stand up, stand up and protect her, and she had to believe in them, and be ready, be ready as best she could, to preserve herself, and especially her daughter, her daughter who was the future....”

RaceBraveryDefenseBlacksRace RelationsWhitesConspiraciesPlots
Book:The Last White Man
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“I did know some people who would receive me, but reluctantly, because I had nothing to offer company save a long face and a self-pitying heart, and I had no intention of changing either. Black Americans of my generation didn't look kindly on public mournings except during or immediately after funerals. We were expected by others and by ourselves to lighten the burden by smiling, to deflect possible new assaults by laughter. Hadn't it worked for us for centuries? Hadn't it?”

DepressionMourningAfrican AmericansBlacksSelf PityBrave Face
Book:All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
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“Queer how that was always cropping up. Here she was highly respectable, married, mother of a small boy, and, in spite of all that, knowing all that, these people took one look at her and immediately got that now-I-wonder look. Apparently it was an automatic reaction of white people—if a girl was colored and fairly young, why, it stood to reason she had to be a prostitute. If not that—at least sleeping with her would be just a simple matter, for all one had to do was make the request. In fact, white men wouldn't even have to do the asking because the girl would ask them on sight. She grew angrier as she thought about it. Of course, none of them could know about your grandmother who had brought you up, she said to herself. And ever since you were big enough to remember the things that people said to you, had said over and over, just like a clock ticking, 'Lutie, baby, don't you never let no white man put his hands on you. They ain't never willin' to let a black woman alone. Seems like they all got a itch and a urge to sleep with 'em. Don't you never let any of 'em touch you.' Something that was said so often and with such gravity it had become a part of you, just like breathing, and you would have preferred crawling in bed with a rattlesnake to getting in bed with a white man. Mrs. Chandler's friends and her mother couldn't possibly know that, couldn't possibly imagine that you might have a distrust and a dislike of white men far deeper than the distrust these white women had of you. Or know that, after hearing their estimation of you, nothing in the world could ever force you to be even friendly with a white man. And again she thought of the barrier between her and these people. The funny part of it was she was willing to trust them and their motives without questioning, but the instant they saw the color of her skin they knew what she must be like; they were so confident about what she must be like they didn't need to know her personally in order to verify their estimate.”

SexRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsStereotypesWhites
Book:The Street
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“Yeah, I thought to myself, like LSD, a black lover is the thing this year. I had seen the white girls in the Village and at off-Broadway theaters clutching their black men tightly while I, manless, looked on with bitterness. I often vowed I would find me an ofay in self-defense, but I could never bring myself to condone the wholesale rape of my slave ancestors by letting a white man touch me.”

SexRelationshipsAfrican AmericansBlacksInterracial Relationships
Author:Louise Meriwether
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“I just wish we could go back to when everybody was happy." "When was everybody happy? What time was that? Did I miss getting on that train?" He leaned a bit into her space. "No one was happy, Sidney. We were just a bunch of people getting on with it, living our lives with monsters on our backs. No, nobody was happy, and nobody told the truth." "What was the truth?" "That the world wasn't ever equal. And the white folks who made it that way--the ones who fought, silent and spitting, to keep it that way--refused all responsibility for what it meant. You can't imagine the inhumanity, horrors on top of horrors. People shot in the streets, in their homes, at grocery stores, so much that after a while some white folks just kind of shrugged. No one was fighting for our bodies. And it went on like that for so long I think we all started to believe that was just the way life was supposed to be. Trust me when I tell you, I've been black all over the world and I always knew what that meant. Not welcomed anywhere, and yet there ain't nowhere else to go. Damn, what a storm in the mind.”

HappinessRacePrejudiceInequalityBigotryAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsInhumanityWhites
Book:Sky Full of Elephants
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“The Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete and prompt improvement in his way of life. What will it profit him to be able to send his children to an integrated school if the family income is insufficient to buy them school clothes? What will he gain by being permitted to move to an integrated neighborhood if he cannot afford to do so because he is unemployed or has a low-paying job with no future? During the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, a nightclub comic observed that, had the demonstrators been served, some of them could not have paid for the meal. Of what advantage is it to the Negro to establish that he can be served in integrated restaurants, or accommodated in integrated hotels, if he is bound to the kind of financial servitude which will not allow him to take a vacation or even to take his wife out to dine? Negroes must not only have the right to go into any establishment open to the public, but they must also be absorbed into our economic system in such a manner that they can afford to exercise that right. The struggle for rights is, at bottom, a struggle for opportunities. In asking for something special, the Negro is not seeking charity. He does not want to languish on welfare rolls any more than the next man. He does not want to be given a job he cannot handle. Neither, however, does he want to be told that there is no place where he can be trained to handle it. So with equal opportunity must come the practical, realistic aid which will equip him to seize it. Giving a pair of shoes to a man who has not learned to walk is a cruel jest.”

EconomicsEqualityOpportunitiesIntegrationAfrican AmericansEquityBlacksReparationsAid
Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“Back in my day, when a white man gave you an opportunity, it came at a cost. You could be his chauffeur, but had to always be available to drive him around no matter if you had plans with your family or not. You could vote, but someone would break your legs if you didn' vote for the candidate they wanted you to. But either way, an opportunity was an opportunity, and if you took it, and learned how to play their game, you could be successful.”

RacismVotingOpportunitiesBlacksRace RelationsWhitesChauffeurs
Book:Black Buck
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“Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?”

FaithHopeJusticeFreedomMusicEqualityAfrican AmericansBlacksSongsSorrow Songs
Book:The Souls of Black Folk
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“Nakia had come across Conrad and Juanita's box of Obama family memorabilia--novelty plates, buttons, their tickets to the first inauguration--when she helped them to pack up to move back to New Jersey. A time capsule of wild hope, almost painful to look back on now. "We really thought that man was gonna be the Black Messiah or something," she said. "What a time." "Yeah, turns out he was very much not," January said. "And white people ain't been okay since. Look at them.”

HopeOptimismAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesPresidentsBarack ObamaMemorabiliaKeepsakes
Book:The Wilderness
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“But the people remember that it happens again and again. A boy and his toy; a teenager on the phone; friends coming home from a party; a girl asking for the right way-- their breath and their light taken in just one shot. But the people still remember that with each rising sun is a new day. With each new year is a new dream; a new seed of hope unearthed, dusted, and polished. The people know that there will be a time of peace.”

HopePeaceRacismMurderAfrican AmericansBlacksBlack HistoryPolice BrutalityAfrican American History
Book:The People Remember
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“Young black boys, Charlie thought, the most marvelous beings in the universe. As nonchalantly as Herald bit into that fruit did black boys ever ponder their influence on the whole world. How effortlessly they rounded the shape of the earth with their swagger and illuminated its days with their creativity. Their hope, Charlie mused, offered even the bleakest parts of our planet a second sun.”

ChildrenHopeBoysCreativityInfluenceAfrican AmericansBlacksSwaggerBlack Boys
Book:Sky Full of Elephants
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“While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing. I have heard this mainly about my novels, from editors who have rejected me and reviewers whom I have apparently confused and, on a couple of occasions, on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads.”

IdentityAfrican AmericansBlacksBlacknessBeing Black
Book:Erasure
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“That morning, like every morning, the first decision he made regarded his Blackness. His skin was a deep, constant brown. In public, when people could actually see him, it was impossible to get his Blackness down to anywhere near a 1.5. If he wore a tie, wing-tipped shoes, smiled constantly, used his indoor voice, and kept his hands strapped and calm at his sides, he could get his Blackness as low as 4.0.”

African AmericansBlacksBlacknessBlack Men
Book:Friday Black
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“Today Birmingham is by no means miraculously desegregated. There is still resistance and violence. The last-ditch struggle of a segregationist governor still soils the pages of current events and it is still necessary for a harried president to invoke his highest powers so that a Negro child may go to school with a white child in Birmingham. But these factors only serve to emphasize the truth that even the segregationists know: The system to which they have been committed lies on its deathbed. The only imponderable is the question of how costly they will make the funeral.”

ViolenceResistanceAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationBirminghamDesegregation
Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“MBEKI Pierre, born in 1905, Scotland. MANDELA Giovanna Rosaria l, born in the 1800s, Italy. ZUMA Andreas, born in 1750, Pologne. TWALO July, born in 1850, USA. MALEMA Jannis, born in 1750, Latvia. These are Surnames of key people in Africa. But they are also a few examples of how people really received their Surnames in Africa ...through colonisation.”

QuotesEducationHistoryMitta XinindluBlacksColonisationMandelaAfricansKnow Your HistorMbeki
Author:Mitta Xinindlu
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“Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro population, but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State. No other State in the Union can count a million Negroes among its citizens,—a population as large as the slave population of the whole Union in 1800; no other State fought so long and strenuously to gather this host of Africans. Oglethorpe thought slavery against law and gospel; but the circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitants were not calculated to furnish citizens over-nice in their ideas about rum and slaves. Despite the prohibitions of the trustees, these Georgians, like some of their descendants, proceeded to take the law into their own hands; and so pliant were the judges, and so flagrant the smuggling, and so earnest were the prayers of Whitefield, that by the middle of the eighteenth century all restrictions were swept away, and the slave-trade went merrily on for fifty years and more.”

SlaveryAfrican AmericansBlacksGeorgia
Book:The Souls of Black Folk
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“But the statue attracted a middle-aged, brown-haired, overweight White guy. Clearly drunk, he climbed onto the tiny stage and started fondling Buddha before his laughing audience of drunk friends at a nearby table. I had learned a long time ago to tune out the antics of drunk White people doing things that could get a Black person arrested. Harmless White fun is Black lawlessness.”

RacismAfrican AmericansBlacksStatuesDrunkennessBuddhaWhitesBad BehaviorInappropriate Behavior
Book:How to Be an Antiracist
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“[The Montgomery Bus Boycott] is not a drama with only one actor. More precisely it is the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.”

African AmericansBlacksSegregationAlabamaMontgomeryMontgomery Bus BoycottSeparate But EqualRigt
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“But this discontent was still latent in 1954. At that time both Negroes and whites accepted the well-established patterns of segregation as a matter of fact. Hardly anyone challenged the system. Montgomery was an easy-going town; it could even have been described as a peaceful town. But the peace was achieved at the cost of human servitude.”

RaceTensionAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationRace RelationsDiscontentAlabamaWhitesMontgomery
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“But there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by oppression. There comes a time when people get tired of being plunged into the abyss of exploitation and nagging injustice. The story of Montgomery is the story of 50,000 such Negroes who were willing to substitute tired feed for tired souls, and walk the streets of Montgomery until the walls of segregation were finally battered by the forces of justice.”

JusticeRacismInjusticeOppressionExploitationAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationAlabamaMontgomery
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“A display cake read JUNETEENTH! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery's owner wasn't. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song's words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone's backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer's sales pitch--so much hanging on that We all know--was targeted not to the people who'd celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who'd feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.”

RaceAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsDessertsGentrificationBakeriesCakesJuneteenth
Book:The Office of Historical Corrections
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“It is, however, important to understand that giving a man his due may often mean giving him special treatment. I am aware of the fact that this has been a troublesome concept for many liberals, since it conflicts with their traditional ideal of equal opportunity and equal treatment of people according to their individual merits. But this is a day which demands new thinking and the reevaluation of old concepts. A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.”

EqualityAfrican AmericansEquityBlacksAffirmative ActionSpecial TreatmentPreferential Treatment
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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“Page 207 In the inner cities of all the major metropolitan areas across the United States, ethnic Koreans represent an increasingly glaring market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the relatively economically depressed African-American majorities around them. In New York City, Koreans, less than .1 percent of the city’s population, own 85 percent of produce stands, 70 percent of grocery stores, 80 percent of nail salons, and 60 percent of dry cleaners. In portions of downtown Los Angeles, Koreans own 40 percent of the real estate but constitute only 10 percent of the residents. Korean-American businesses in Los Angeles County number roughly 25,000, with gross sales of $4.5 billion. Nationwide, Korean entrepreneurs have in the last decade come to control 80 percent of the $2.5 billion African-American beauty business, which—“like preaching and burying people”—historically was always a “black” business and a source of pride, income, and jobs for African-Americans. “They’ve come in and taken away a market that’s not rightfully theirs,” is the common, angry view among inner-city blacks. Page 208 At a December 31, 1994, rally, Norman “Grand Dad” Reide, vice president of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, accused Koreans of “reaping a financial harvest at the expense of black people” and recommended that “we boycott the bloodsucking Koreans.” More recently, in November 2000, African-Americans firebombed a Korean-owned grocery store in northeast Washington, D.C. The spray-painted message on the charred walls: “Burn them down, Shut them down, Black Power!”

BlacksAffirmative ActionEthnic ConflictRiotsKoreansSmall Business Administration
Book:World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
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“In 7.81 square miles of vaunted black community, the 850 square feet of Dum Dum Donuts was the only place in the "community" where one could experience the Latin root of the word, where a citizen could revel in common togetherness. So one rainy Sunday afternoon, not long after the tanks and media attention had left, my father ordered his usual. He sat at the table nearest the ATM and said aloud, to no one in particular, "Do you know that the average household net worth for whites is $113,149 per year, Hispanics $6,325, and black folks $5,677?" "For real?" "What's your source material, nigger?" "The Pew Research Center." Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center, and hearing this, the concerned patrons turned around in their squeaky plastic seats as best they could, given that donut shop swivel chairs swivel only six degrees in either direction. Pops politely asked the manager to dim the lights. I switched on the overhead projector, slid a transparency over the glass, and together we craned our necks toward the ceiling, where a bar graph titled "Income Disparity as Determined by Race" hovered overhead like some dark, damning, statistical cumulonimbus cloud threatening to rain on our collective parades. "I was wondering what that li'l nigger was doing in a donut shop with a damn overhead projector.”

CommunityIncomeAfrican AmericansBlacksIncome InequalityPresentationsRacial Relations
Book:The Sellout
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“And finally, now, to-day, when we are awakening to the fact that the perpetuity of republican institutions on this continent depends on the purification of the ballot, the civic training of voters, and the raising of voting to the plane of a solemn duty which a patriotic citizen neglects to his peril and to the peril of his children’s children,—in this day, when we are striving for a renaissance of civic virtue, what are we going to say to the black voter of the South? Are we going to tell him still that politics is a disreputable and useless form of human activity? Are we going to induce the best class of Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to give up their right to take such an interest, without a protest? I am not saying a word against all legitimate efforts to purge the ballot of ignorance, pauperism, and crime. But few have pretended that the present movement for disfranchisement in the South is for such a purpose; it has been plainly and frankly declared in nearly every case that the object of the disfranchising laws is the elimination of the black man from politics.”

GovernmentPoliticsVotingAfrican AmericansBlacksElectionsVoting RightsDisenfranchisementBallot
Book:The Souls of Black Folk
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“Certainly, the Negro has been deprived. Few people consider the fact that, in addition to being enslaved for two centuries, the Negro was, during all those years, robbed of the wages of his toil. No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest.”

RacismLaborPrejudiceSlaveryDiscriminationWagesAfrican AmericansBlacksReparationsGenerational Wealth
Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“White Southerners' commitment to the Confederate cause was not predicated on whether or not they owned slaves. The commitment was based on a desire to maintain a society in which Black people remained at the bottom of the social hierarchy.”

RacismSlaverySouthCivil WarAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesSouthernersConfederacy
Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
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“Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash. This characterization is necessarily general. It would be grossly unfair to omit recognition of a minority of whites who genuinely want authentic equality. Their commitment is real, sincere, and is expressed in a thousand deeds. But they are balanced at the other end of the pole by the unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism. America had a master race in the antebellum South. Reestablishing it with a resurgent Klan and a totally disenfranchised lower class would realize the dream of too many extremists on the right.”

EqualityBrotherhoodAfrican AmericansBlacksCredibilityRace RelationsWhitesBacklashKu Klux KlanSegregationists
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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“When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we've actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless. Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn't have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations. White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama's ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancements, there's a reaction, a backlash.”

RaceRacismRageReactionsAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesBacklash
Book:The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
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“All of this tells us that the white backlash is nothing new. White America has been backlashing on the fundamental God-given and human rights of Negro Americans for more than three hundred years. With all of her dazzling achievements and stupendous material strides, America has maintained its strange ambivalence on the question of racial justice.”

AmericaJusticeRaceAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesBacklashRacial Justice
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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“Historically, whenever Black people and people of color made progress in America, the demons of white rage would rise with a fury to choke and wrestle this country back to 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It was inevitable that Obama's election would unleash and invigorate the same malevolent forces that had always existed and corrupted America's promise for the rest of us. I knew it. Many people of color knew it and lived it. Even Obama knew it.”

AmericaRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksObamaBacklashBarack ObamaPeople Of Color
Book:Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
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“Even the most kindhearted white woman, Dragging herself through traffic with her nails On the wheel & her head in a chamber of black Modern American music may begin, almost Carelessly, to breathe n-words. Yes, even the most Bespectacled hallucination cruising the lanes Of America may find her tongue curls inward, Entangling her windpipe, her vents, toes & pedals When she drives alone. Even the most made up Layers of persona in a two- or four-door vehicle Sealed in a fountain of bass & black boys Chanting n-words may begin to chant inwardly Softly before she can catch herself. Of course, After that, what is inward, is absorbed.”

PoetryWomenRacismPoemsAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesWhite WomenN Word
Book:American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
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