Quotessence
Home / Topics / Institutional Racism Quotes

Institutional Racism Quotes

Browse 59 quotes about Institutional Racism.

Institutional Racism Quotes

“Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place. And she began thinking of Pop unable to get a job; of Jim slowly disintegrating because he, too, couldn’t get a job, and of the subsequent wreck of their marriage; of Bub left to his own devices after school. From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in and the wall had been built up brick by brick by eager white hands.”

RacePovertyRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesInstitutional RacismNeighborhoodsGhettos
Book:The Street
Create image

“Kindness is not just the absence of being mean or hateful. Being kind entails actively resisting actions, ideas, and institutions that rob others of dignity.”

KindnessRespectDignitySocial JusticeHuman DignityInstitutional RacismInstitutional OppressionInstitutional Abuse
Book:In Defense of Kindness: Why It Matters, How It Changes Our Lives, and How It Can Save the World
Create image

“As a person of color in America, you need to fly to reach the hallowed gates of wealth and mainstream success while others can just walk. "Good" is not good enough. You have to be exceptional, especially when you don't have the legacy admissions, the generational wealth, the mentors who look like you and come from your communities, and an entire system that benefits one skin color and gender at the detriment of others.”

AmericaRacismBeing The BestEquityInstitutional RacismPeople Of ColorInequity
Book:Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
Create image

“It is not a secret that most American and Western institutions and workplaces are very much like mountains: the higher one climbs, the whiter they become. But this whiteness at the top should not be seen as representative of all white people. We must distinguish between the white people who are as marginalized, silenced, and impoverished just like many other groups, and the specific ruling class that is white and that in fact also includes a big percentage of people who only started passing as white in recent history. The latter fact is crucial to understand why the small percentage of privileged whites at the top don’t mind the narratives that bracket all white people together, because in doing so, they continue to use all whites as human shields, while benefiting from framing everyone else as an enemy of white people at large. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”

RacismWhite SupremacyDiversity And InclusionInstitutional RacismDivide And ConquerDecolonialityEquity And InclusionWhitness
Author:Louis Yako
Create image

“Many DEI officers/professionals I have spoken to over the years have confirmed to me that they don’t feel they have any power to change the structures of the workplaces in which they work. They are given just enough power – along with a fancy job title – to appear as though they are making changes, but once and if they dare to confront real problems, they are often replaced or disciplined by the privileged whites who remain at the top of every institution and organization. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”

PowerRacismSocial JusticeElitesWhite SupremacyDiversity And InclusionInstitutional RacismDivide And ConquerEquity And InclusionInstitutional Oppression
Author:Louis Yako
Create image

“In the end, we are left with this painful conundrum: we only need DEI initiatives because we don’t truly have a society that values diversity, we don’t have equitable workplaces and communities, and we don’t practice inclusion in the deep sense of the word. The day we have them weaved into the fabric of our human awareness is the day the need for such initiatives will cease to exist. Yet, to forcefully do away with DEI is a way to forcefully govern, discipline, and put each marginalized body and group of people in their right place – a place of servitude – through a culture of fear and terror spread by the privileged white oligarchs at the top. This is precisely why silence and retreat are much costlier than resisting not only what is being done to DEI, but how DEI has been done all along. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”

RacismWhite SupremacyDiversity And InclusionCorporate GovernanceInstitutional RacismEquity And InclusionInstitutional OppressionInstitutionalized Racism
Author:Louis Yako
Create image

“THE COLOR LINE FOUND NECESSARY' ...As attendance of the colored people would increase, proportionately the number of the whites would decrease; for explain it how we will, a majority of whites prefer not to intermingle closely with other races. Recognizing that it meant either the success of the failure of the enterprise of the Drama as respects the whites, we have been compelled to assign the colored friends to the gallery, which, however, is just as good for seeing and hearing as any other part of The Temple. Some were offended at this arrangement. We have received numerous letters from the colored friends, some claiming that it is not right to make a difference, other indignantly and bitterly denouncing us as enemies of the colored people. Some, confident that Brother Russell had never sanctioned such discrimination, told that they believe it would be duty to stand up for equal rights and always help the oppressed, etc. ... We again suggested that if a suitable place could be found in which the Drama could be presented for the benefit of the colored people alone, we would be glad to make such arrangements, or to co-operate with any others in doing so. Our explanations were apparently entirely satisfactory to all of the fully consecrated. To these we explained that it is a question of putting either the interests of God's cause first, or else the interests of the race first. We believe it is our duty to put God first and the truth first--at any cost to others or to ourselves! ... it is only a question of whether our giving to them in one way would entirely deprive us of giving the truth to others. ... In answer to the query as to how our course of conduct squared with the Golden Rule, we replied that it squares exactly. We would wish others to put God first. ... We reminded one dear sister that the Lord enjoins humility...If nature favors the colored brethren and sisters in the exercise of humility it is that much to their advantage, if they are rightly exercised by it. ... A little while, and the Millennial kingdom will be inaugurated, which will bring restitution to all mankind--restitution to the perfection of mind and body, feature and color, to the grand original standard, which God declared 'very good,' and which was lost for a time through sin, but which is soon to be restored by the powerful kingdom of Messiah.”

BlmInstitutional RacismInstitutionalized RacismJehovahs WitnessesJwWtbtsCt Russell
Book:1914 Watch Tower
Create image

“Question: Is there anything in the Bible that reveals the origin of the Negro? Answer: It is generally believed that the curse which Noah pronounced upon Canaan was the origin of the Black race. Certain it is that when Noah said, "Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren," he pictured the future of the Colored race. They have been and are a race of servants, but now in the dawn of the twentieth century, we are all coming to see this matter of service in its true light and find that the only real joy in life is in serving others; not bossing them. There is no servant in the world as good as a good Colored servant, and they joy that he gets from rendering faithful service is one of the purest joys there is in the world.”

RacismBlmInstitutional RacismInstitutionalized RacismJehovahs WitnessesJwNegroWtbtsCt Russell
Book:The Golden Age
Create image

“I believe that there are four institutions in American history that have shaped our approach to race and justice but remain poorly understood. The first, of course, is slavery. This was followed by the reign of terror that shaped the lives of people of color following the collapse of Reconstruction until World War II. ....The third institution, "Jim Crow," is the legalized racial segregation and suppression of basic rights that defined the American apartheid era. ....The fourth institution is mass incarceration.”

JusticeRacismSlaveryJustice SystemReconstructionIncarcerationJim CrowMass IncarcerationInstitutional Racism
Book:Just Mercy
Create image

“Our world is suffering from metastatic cancer. Stage 4. Racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, intersecting with bigotry of all kinds, justifying all kinds of inequities by victim blaming; heightening exploitation and misplaced hate; spurring mass shootings, arms races, and demagogues who polarize nations, shutting down essential organs of democracy; and threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change. In the United States, the metastatic cancer has been spreading, contracting, and threatening to kill the American body as it nearly did before its birth, as it nearly did during its Civil War. But how many people stare inside the body of their nations' racial inequities, their neighborhoods' racial inequities, their occupations' racial inequities, their institutions' racial inequities, and flatly deny that their policies are racist? They flatly deny that racial inequity is a signpost of racist policy. They flatly deny the racist policy as they use racist ideas to justify the racial inequity. They flatly deny the cancer of racism as the cancer cells spread and literally threaten their own lives and the lives of the people and spaces and places they hold dear. The popular conception of denial--like the popular strategy of suasion--is suicidal.”

RacismDenialSystemic RacismInstitutional RacismAntiracismInequityRacist Policies
Book:How to Be an Antiracist
Create image

“Going into any prison is deeply confusing if you know anything about the racial demographics of America. The extreme overrepresentation of people of color, the disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, the targeted prosecution of drug crimes in poor communities, the criminalization of new immigrants and undocumented people, the collateral consequences of voter disenfranchisement, and the barriers to re-entry can only be fully understood through the lens of our racial history.”

JusticeRaceRacismPrisonDemographicsInstitutional RacismPrisonersSentencing
Book:Just Mercy
Create image

“The black officer checks Daddy while his partner glances around at all of the onlookers. There's quite a few of us now. Ms. Yvette and a couple of her clients stand in her doorway, towels around the clients' shoulders. A car has stopped in the street. "Everyone, go about your own business," the white one says. "No, sir," says Tim. "This is our business.”

PoliceAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityInstitutional RacismWitnesses
Book:The Hate U Give
Create image

“I asked another friend what it's like being the mother of a black son. "The condition of black life is one of mourning," she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son's reality. At any moment she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.”

RaceDangerRacismPrejudiceAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityInstitutional Racism
Book:The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
Create image

“The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experience as citizens.”

AmericaRaceCitizensRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksWhite SupremacyWhitesInstitutional Racism
Book:The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
Create image

“It is the beginning of the year of our Lord 1963. I see a young Negro boy. He is sitting on a stoop in front of a vermin-infested apartment house in Harlem. The stench of garbage is in the halls. The drunks, the jobless, the junkies are shadow figures of his everyday world. The boy goes to a school attended mostly by Negro students with a scattering of Puerto Ricans. His father is one of the jobless. His mother is a sleep-in domestic, working for a family on Long Island. I see a young Negro girl. She is sitting on the stoop of a rickety wooden one-family house in Birmingham. Some visitors would call it a shack. It needs paint badly and the patched-up roof appears in danger of caving in. Half a dozen small children, in various stages of undress, are scampering about the house. The girl is forced to play the role of their mother. She can no longer attend the all-Negro school in her neighborhood because her mother died only recently after a car accident. Neighbors say if the ambulance hadn't come so late to take her to the all-Negro hospital the mother might still be alive. The girl's father is a porter in a downtown department store. He will always be a porter, for there are no promotions for the Negro in this store, where every counter serves him except the one that sells hot dogs and orange juice. This boy and this girl, separated by stretching miles, are wondering: Why does misery constantly haunt the Negro? In some distant past, had their forebears done some tragic injury to the nation, and was the curse of punishment upon the black race? Had they shirked in their duty as patriots, betrayed their country, denied their national birthright? Had they refused to defend their land against a foreign foe?”

RacismMiseryUnhappinessAfrican AmericansBlacksInstitutional Racism
Book:Why We Can't Wait
Create image

“Lieutenant Thomas R. Gilligan, thirty-seven, was off duty and out of uniform, checking out TVs in an electronics store. He went to investigate the commotion and stopped James Powell, a ninth grader who had joined the mob of angry students. Powell was unarmed, according to witnesses. Gilligan maintained that the boy flashed a knife. He shot him three times. Two days later, Harlem erupted. Pierce told Carney, "You have the people who are angry. Justifably so. And then there's the police force. How are they going to defend this shit? Again! And city hall and the activists. And in the way back of the room, you can barely hear a little voice, and that's the family. They've lost a son. Somebody has to speak for them." "They're going to sue?" "Sue and win. You know they ain't going to fire the bastard." Sermon crept into his voice here. "What kind of message will that send--that their police force is accountable? We'll sue, and it will take years, and the city will pay because millions and millions are still cheaper than putting a true price on killing a black boy.”

RacismPoliceAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityHarlemRiotsInstitutional RacismUprisings
Book:Harlem Shuffle
Create image

“The system's acts are covert, just as the racist ideas of the people are implicit. I could not wrap my head around the system or precisely define it, but I knew the system was there, like the polluted air in our atmosphere, poisoning Black people to the benefit of White people. But what if the atmosphere of racism has been polluting most White people, too?”

RaceRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksSystemic RacismWhitesInstitutional Racism
Book:How to Be an Antiracist
Create image

“I thought I had it all figured out. I thought of racism as an inanimate, immortal system, not as a living, recognizable, mortal disease of cancer cells that we could identify and treat and kill. I considered the system as essential to the United States and the Constitution. At times, I thought White people covertly operated the system, fixed it to benefit the total White community at the expense of the total Black community. The construct of covert institutional racism opens American eyes to racism and, ironically, closes them, too. Separating the overt individual from the covert institutional veils the specific policy choices that cause racial inequities, policies made by specific people. Covering up the specific policies and policymakers prevents us from identifying and replacing the specific policies and policy makers. We become unconscious to racist policymakers and policies as we lash out angrily at the abstract bogeyman of "the system.”

PolicyRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksSystemic RacismWhitesInstitutional RacismRacist PoliciesPolicymakersRacist Policymakers
Book:How to Be an Antiracist
Create image

“[...] white supremacy and coloniality still form the glue for the institutional and intellectual disciplinarity of western critical thought. Since the ideas of the Black Panther Party are limited to concerns with ethnic racism elsewhere, they do not register as thought qua thought, and can thus be exploited by and elevated to universality only in the hands of European thinkers such as Foucault, albeit without receiving any credit. [Dear reader, if this reminds you of the colonial expropriation of natural resources, you would be neither wrong nor alone in making such an assumption. In the words of Kanye West: that shit cray.]”

White SupremacyInstitutional RacismFoucaultBlack Panther PartyKanye WestColoniality
Book:Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human
Create image

“A cop on a motorcycle roared alongside, waved them to the curb. 'Goin' to a fire?' he demanded. He peered into the car and Lutie saw a slight stiffening of his face. That meant he had seen they were colored. She waited for his next words with a wincing feeling, thinking it was like having an old wound that had never healed and you could see someone about to knock against it and it was too late to get out of the way, and there was that horrible tiny split second of time when you waited for the contact, anticipating the pain and quivering away from it before it actually started. The cop's mouth twisted into an ugly line.”

RaceRacismPoliceAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesCopsInstitutional Racism
Book:The Street
Create image

“The women work because the white folks give them jobs—washing dishes and clothes and floors and windows. The women work because for years now the white folks haven’t liked to give black men jobs that paid enough for them to support their families. And finally it gets to be too late for some of them. Even wars don’t change it. The men get out of the habit of working and the houses are old and gloomy and the walls press in. And the men go off, move on, slip away, find new women. Find younger women.”

RaceRacismBlack WomenAfrican AmericansBlacksWorkingWhitesInstitutional RacismBlack Men
Book:The Street
Create image

“I watched these young people read to the audience parts of history that placed our country in context. I felt, in that moment, envious of them. Had I known when I was younger what some of these students were sharing, I felt as if I would have been liberated from a social and emotional paralysis that for so long I could not name--a paralysis that had arisen from never knowing enough of my own history to effectively identify the lies I was being told by others: lies about what slavery was and what it did to people; lies about what came after our supposed emancipation; lies about why our country looks the way it does today. I had grown up in a world that never tired of telling me and other Black children like me all of the things that were wrong with us, all of the things we needed to do better. But not enough people spoke about the reason so many Black children grow up in communities saturated with poverty and violence. Not enough people spoke about how these realities were the result of decisions made by people in power and had existed for generations before us.”

HistoryRacismSlaveryAfrican AmericansBlacksBlack HistoryAfrican American HistoryInstitutional Racism
Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Create image

“I asked [my grandfather] if there would ever be an America in which white Americans were not actively working to keep themselves positioned atop the racial hierarchy. He thought for a moment and then said, "Some of them will never give it up.”

AmericaRaceBlacksWhite SupremacyRace RelationsWhitesInstitutional Racism
Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Create image

“A’ight, so what do you think it means?” “You don’t know?” I ask. “I know. I wanna hear what YOU think.” Here he goes. Picking my brain. “Khalil said it’s about what society feeds us as youth and how it comes back and bites them later,” I say. “I think it’s about more than youth though. I think it’s about us, period.” “Us who?” he asks. “Black people, minorities, poor people. Everybody at the bottom in society.” “The oppressed,” says Daddy. “Yeah. We’re the ones who get the short end of the stick, but we’re the ones they fear the most. That’s why the government targeted the Black Panthers, right? Because they were scared of the Panthers?” “Uh-huh,” Daddy says. “The Panthers educated and empowered the people. That tactic of empowering the oppressed goes even further back than the Panthers though. Name one.” Is he serious? He always makes me think. This one takes me a second. “The slave rebellion of 1831,” I say. “Nat Turner empowered and educated other slaves, and it led to one of the biggest slave revolts in history.” “A’ight, a’ight. You on it.” He gives me dap. “So, what’s the hate they’re giving the ‘little infants’ in today’s society?” “Racism?” “You gotta get a li’l more detailed than that. Think ’bout Khalil and his whole situation. Before he died.” “He was a drug dealer.” It hurts to say that. “And possibly a gang member.” “Why was he a drug dealer? Why are so many people in our neighborhood drug dealers?” I remember what Khalil said—he got tired of choosing between lights and food. “They need money,” I say. “And they don’t have a lot of other ways to get it.” “Right. Lack of opportunities,” Daddy says. “Corporate America don’t bring jobs to our communities, and they damn sure ain’t quick to hire us. Then, shit, even if you do have a high school diploma, so many of the schools in our neighborhoods don’t prepare us well enough. That’s why when your momma talked about sending you and your brothers to Williamson, I agreed. Our schools don’t get the resources to equip you like Williamson does. It’s easier to find some crack than it is to find a good school around here. “Now, think ’bout this,” he says. “How did the drugs even get in our neighborhood? This is a multibillion-dollar industry we talking ’bout, baby. That shit is flown into our communities, but I don’t know anybody with a private jet. Do you?” “No.” “Exactly. Drugs come from somewhere, and they’re destroying our community,” he says. “You got folks like Brenda, who think they need them to survive, and then you got the Khalils, who think they need to sell them to survive. The Brendas can’t get jobs unless they’re clean, and they can’t pay for rehab unless they got jobs. When the Khalils get arrested for selling drugs, they either spend most of their life in prison, another billion-dollar industry, or they have a hard time getting a real job and probably start selling drugs again. That’s the hate they’re giving us, baby, a system designed against us. That’s Thug Life.”

Thug LifeInstitutional RacismDrug TraffickingBlack Panther Party
Book:The Hate U Give
Create image

“The notion that Google/ Alphabet has the potential to be a democratizing force is certainly laudable, but the contradictions inherent in its projects must be contextualized in the historical conditions that both create and are created by it.”

RacismLibertarianismGoogleAlphabetInstitutional RacismSocial GoodInequityBlack Studies
Book:Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
Create image

“Birmingham has proved that no matter what you're up against, if wave after wave of black people keep coming prepared to go to jail, sooner or later there is such confusion, such social dislocation, that white people in the South are faced with a choice: either integrated restaurants or no restaurants at all, integrated public facilities or none at all. And the South then must make its choice for integration, for it would rather have that than chaos. This struggle is only beginning in the North, but it will be a bitter struggle. It will be an attack on business, on trade unions, and on the government. The Negro will no longer tolerate a situation where for every white man unemployed there are two or three Negroes unemployed. In the North, Negroes present a growing threat to the social order that, less brutally and more subtly than the South, attempts to keep him "in his place." In response, moderates today warn of the danger of violence and "extremism" but do not attempt to change conditions that brutalize the Negro and breed racial conflict. What is needed is an ongoing massive assault on racist political power and institutions.”

RaceRacismSouthCivil RightsProtestAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesInstitutional RacismNorth
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
Create image

“The traditional reluctance in this country to confront the real nature of racism is once again illustrated by the manner in which the majority of American whites interpreted what the Kerner Commission had to say about white racism. It seems that they have taken the Kerner Report as a call merely to examine their individual attitudes. The examination of individual attitudes is, of course, an indispensable requirement if the influence of racism is to be neutralized, but it is neither the only nor the basic requirement. The Kerner Report took great pains to make a distinction between racist attitudes and racist behavior. In doing so, it was trying to point out that the fundamental problem lies in the racist behavior of American institutions toward Negroes, and that the behavior of these institutions is influenced more by overt racist actions of people than by their private attitudes. If so, then the basic requirement is for white Americans, while not ignoring the necessity for a revision of their private beliefs, to concentrate on actions that can lead to the ultimate democratization of American institutions. By focusing upon private attitudes alone, white Americans may come to rely on token individual gestures as a way of absolving themselves personally of racism, while ignoring the work that needs to be done within public institutions to eradicate social and economic problems and redistribute wealth and opportunity. I mean by this that there are many whites sitting around in drawing rooms and board rooms discussing their consciences and even donating a few dollars to honor the memory of Dr. King. But they are not prepared to fight politically for the kind of liberal Congress the country needs to eradicate some of the evils of racism, or for the massive programs needed for the social and economic reconstruction of the black and white poor, or for a revision of the tax structure whereby the real burden will be lifted from the shoulders of those who don't have it and placed on the shoulders of those who can afford it. Our time offers enough evidence to show that racism and intolerance are not unique American phenomena. The relationship between the upper and lower classes in India is in some ways more brutal than the operation of racism in America. And in Nigeria black tribes have recently been killing other black tribes in behalf of social and political privilege. But it is the nature of the society which determines whether such conflicts will last, whether racism and intolerance will remain as proper issues to be socially and politically organized. If the society is a just society, if it is one which places a premium on social justice and human rights, then racism and intolerance cannot survive —will, at least, be reduced to a minimum. While working with the NAACP some years ago to integrate the University of Texas, I was assailed with a battery of arguments as to why Negroes should not be let in. They would be raping white girls as soon as they came in; they were dirty and did not wash; they were dumb and could not learn; they were uncouth and ate with their fingers. These attitudes were not destroyed because the NAACP psychoanalyzed white students or held seminars to teach them about black people. They were destroyed because Thurgood Marshall got the Supreme Court to rule against and destroy the institution of segregated education. At that point, the private views of white students became irrelevant. So while there can be no argument that progress depends both on the revision of private attitudes and a change in institutions, the onus must be placed on institutional change. If the institutions of this society are altered to work for black people, to respond to their needs and legitimate aspirations, then it will ultimately be a matter of supreme indifference to them whether white people like them, or what white people whisper about them in the privacy of their drawing rooms.”

RaceRacismEqualityBlacksRace RelationsInstitutional RacismRacists African Americans
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
Create image

“The petition argued that the Court's decision was a dire mistake; if the decision were allowed to stand and prosecutors were compelled to explain gross racial disparities such as the ones at issue, it would...'paralyze the criminal justice system'—apparently because severe and inexplicable racial disparities pervaded the system as a whole.”

Criminal Justice SystemInstitutional RacismImplicit BiasColorblindness
Book:The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Create image

“Despite the fact that this scene played out over and over in registrars' offices across the South—where a registrar in Mississippi could even ask African Americans, "How many bubbles in a bar of soap?" —the law itself was just race-neutral enough to withstand judicial scrutiny.”

RacismWhite SupremacyInstitutional RacismVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Create image

“We are not to forget, either, that Africa is inhabited by various tribes or nations of negroes--some more and some less degraded than the average...the white race exhibits some qualities of superiority over any other...The secret of the greater intelligence and aptitude of the Caucasian undoubtedly in great measure is to be attributed to the commingling of blood amongst its various branches; and this was evidently forced in large measure by circumstances under divine control.”

White SupremacyPseudoscienceInstitutional RacismJehovahs WitnessesJwWtbts
Book:Zion's Watch Tower: Complete 1902
Create image

“It would be easy to quit if it was just about me, Khalil, that night, and that cop. It's about way more than that though. It's about Seven. Sekani. Kenya. DeVante. It's also about Oscar. Aiyana. Trayvon. Rekia. Michael. Eric. Tamir. John. Ezell. Sandra. Freddie. Alton. Philando. It's even about that little boy in 1955 who nobody recognized at first--Emmett. The messed-up part? There are so many more. Yet I think it'll change one day. How? I don't know. When? I definitely don't know. Why? Because there will always be someone ready to fight. Maybe it's my turn.”

HateChangeRacismActivismAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityInstitutional RacismThe Hate U Give
Book:The Hate U Give
Create image

“I have to think about that one for a minute. “Everybody’s pissed ’cause One-Fifteen hasn’t been charged,” I say, “but also because he’s not the first one to do something like this and get away with it. It’s been happening, and people will keep rioting until it changes. So I guess the system’s still giving hate, and everybody’s still getting fucked?” Daddy laughs and gives me dap. “My girl. Watch your mouth, but yeah, that’s about right. And we won’t stop getting fucked till it changes. That’s the key. It’s gotta change.” A lump forms in my throat as the truth hits me. Hard. “That’s why people are speaking out, huh? Because it won’t change if we don’t say something." "Exactly. We can't be silent." "So I can't be silent.”

HateSilenceRacismPoliceActivismAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalitySpeaking OutInstitutional Racism
Book:The Hate U Give
Create image

“For most Black people there is still poverty and desperation. The Ghettos still exist, and the proportion of Blacks in prison is still much greater than Whites. Today, there is less overt racism, but the economic injustices create an "institutional racism" which exists even while more Blacks are in high places, such as Condoleeza Rice in Bush's Administration and Obama running for President.”

PeopleStillsRunningTodayBlackPresidentPovertyGreaterEconomicRacismPrisonInjusticeAdministrationProportionBlack PeopleDesperationRiceGhettoHigh PlacesInstitutional RacismEconomic Injustice
Author:Howard Zinn
Create image

“You should be able to criticize civil servants for what you think is wrongdoing without being painted as a cop-hater. I don't feel the police are all corrupt, however I do feel they are suffering from institutional racism and there needs to be a top-to-bottom examination of the way they practice and the way they criminalize young black and brown males. The fact that they seem to have backed off from it seems to suggest they realize they overreacted on me and it looks bad.”

ThinkingWayNeedsFeelsShouldLooksFactsSeemsAbleYoungSufferingBlackRealizingPracticeRacismPoliceMalesBottomServantBrownCriticizeCopExaminationWrongdoingCivil ServantsInstitutional Racism
Author:Quentin Tarantino
Create image