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Race Relations Quotes

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Race Relations Quotes

“I don't hate white people. I hate the whole world for letting what happened to us go on the way it did. You telling me hundreds of years of torture and couldn't nobody stop it? And ain't nobody want to rectify it? Hell yeah, damn right I'm mad and I'll be mad forever, until the day I die, and even then I want them to set my coffin on fire so I can be mad in the afterlife. Because what happened to our people deserves that kind of mad. And if won't nobody else feel it, I'll goddamn feel it enough for everybody. That's my liberation.”

HateRaceAngerLiberationAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesInequity
Book:Sky Full of Elephants
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“What do I think about my neighbors? These people. These people who have sprayed the word nigger on my door. These people who finally threatened my children. My children did you hear me? Have you ever held a child in your arms while she shook her insides out? She was so scared I cried her to sleep. How do you ever tell a child again that she's safe? Huh? What do I think of these people? Huh? What should anyone think? What should you reporters think? What should the city think? What should the mayor think? What should the country think?”

PoetryHatePoemRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsHate SpeechNeighbors
Book:Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems
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“At that, the crowd joined in--this was one of the Free Americans' rallying cries--We are the future--a cheerful way of saying the shame of the U.S. past wasn't genocide or terror but the fact that it hadn't completely worked out yet. It was nothing I hadn't heard before, but it was rattling. It was the ubiquity or it was the persistence. It was the way the Free Americans and their claims on being the only way Americans transcended facts and time and progress, the way they always seemed to be around the corner, the way, however lacking in general insight they might be, they could somehow hear the ticking clock of the question, the Do they know I'm human yet? the way they took delight in saying no, the way they took for granted that it would always be their question to answer.”

HateRaceRacismBlacksWhite SupremacyRace RelationsWhite Supremacists
Book:The Office of Historical Corrections
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“Goddamn, so this is what it means to have a leader You despise, the racists said when the president Was black and I’ll be damned if I ain’t saying it too. Is this a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty, Stupidity, an idiot’s threats & gangsta narcissisms threading Every shabby sentence his trumpet constructs?”

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Book:American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
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“Building bridges takes us further than building walls.”

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Author:DaShanne Stokes
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“It's a scary world we live in when a person of color endorses a racist for president.”

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Author:DaShanne Stokes
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“Prejudice plunges you into a world of fear and hate. That's no way to live.”

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Author:DaShanne Stokes
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“If the idea of loving those whom you have been taught to recognize as your enemies is too overwhelming, consider more deeply the observation that we are all much more alike than we are unalike.”

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Book:Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays
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“This is the time for the creative Man. Woman. Who must decide that She. He. Can live in peace. Racial and sexual justice on this earth. This is the time for you and me. African American. Whites. Latinos. Gays. Asians. Jews. Native Americans. Lesbians. Muslims. All of us must finally bury the elitism of race superiority the elitism of sexual superiority the elitism of economic superiority the elitism of religious superiority So we welcome you on the celebration of 218 years Philadelphia. America.”

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Book:Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems
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“Fears of interracial sex and marriage have deep roots in the United States. The confluence of race and sex was a powerful force in dismantling Reconstruction after the Civil War, sustaining Jim Crow laws for a century and fueling divisive racial politics throughout the twentieth century. In the aftermath of slavery, the creation of a system of racial hierarchy and segregation was largely designed to prevent intimate relationships like Walter and Karen’s—relationships that were, in fact, legally prohibited by “anti-miscegenation statutes” (the word miscegenation came into use in the 1860s, when supporters of slavery coined the term to promote the fear of interracial sex and marriage and the race mixing that would result if slavery were abolished). For over a century, law enforcement officials in many Southern communities absolutely saw it as part of their duty to investigate and punish black men who had been intimate with white women.”

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Book:Just Mercy
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“Negroes have proceeded from a premise that equality means what it says, and they have taken white Americans at their word when they talked of it as an objective. But most whites in America in 1967, including many persons of goodwill, proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement. White America is not even psychologically organized to close the gap—essentially it seeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects to retain it. Most of the abrasions between Negroes and white liberals arise from this fact. White America is uneasy with injustice and for ten years it believed it was righting wrongs. The struggles were often bravely fought by fine people. The conscience of man flamed high in hours of peril. The days can never be forgotten when the brutalities at Selma caused thousands all over the land to rush to our side, heedless of danger and of differences in race, class and religion. After the march to Montgomery, there was a delay at the airport and several thousand demonstrators waited more than five hours, crowding together on the seats, the floors and the stairways of the terminal building. As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood. But these were the best of America, not all of America. Elsewhere the commitment was shallower. Conscience burned only dimly, and when atrocious behavior was curbed, the spirit settled easily into well-padded pockets of complacency. Justice at the deepest level had but few stalwart champions. A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared.”

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Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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“If anyone had questioned how deeply the summer's activities had penetrated the consciousness of white America, the answer was evident in the treatment accorded the March on Washington by all the media of communication. Normally Negro activities are the object of attention in the press only when they are likely to lead to some dramatic outbreak, or possess some bizarre quality. The March was the first organized Negro operation which was accorded respect and coverage commensurate with its importance. The millions who viewed it on television were seeing an event historic not only because of the subject, but because it was being brought into their homes. Millions of white Americans, for the first time, had a clear, long look at Negroes engaged in a serious occupation. For the first time millions listened to the informed and thoughtful words of Negro spokesmen, from all walks of life. The stereotype of the Negro suffered a heavy blow. This was evident in some of the comment, which reflected surprise at the dignity, the organization and even the wearing apparel and friendly spirit of the participants. If the press had expected something akin to a minstrel show, or a brawl, or a comic display of odd clothes and bad manners, they were disappointed. A great deal has been said about a dialogue between Negro and white. Genuinely to achieve it requires that all the media of communication open their channels wide as they did on that radiant August day. As television beamed the image of this extraordinary gathering across the border oceans, everyone who believed in man's capacity to better himself had a moment of inspiration and confidence in the future of the human race. And every dedicated American could be proud that a dynamic experience of democracy in his nation's capital had been made visible to the world.”

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Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“It's 1963: we're in the year of prophetic fulfillment. The last revival meeting is at hand, where the sons took up the cross of the fathers. White sons went forth to the dirt roads of Georgia and Alabama to prove to their fathers that the melting pot could still melt. "Negro" sons went forth to the Woolworths and Grants and Greyhounds of America to prove to their fathers that they could eat and sit and ride as well in the front as in the back, as well seated as standing.”

RaceActivismCivil RightsProtestBlacksSegregationRace RelationsCivil Rights MovementWhites1963
Book:Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
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“...Bayard Rustin has hewed to the line he has pursued all along. This is the line of civil rights, equality, and integration, and the strategy of the ballot, the union card, and coalition politics. While the demand for equality itself is not revolutionary, he insists that "the response that must be made in order to satisfy the demand very much is. By this I mean that justice cannot be done to blacks in the absence of a total restructuring of the political, economic, and social institutions of this country." Never willing to settle for a "symbolic victory" or a pseudo-revolution, he holds out for "nothing less than the radical refashioning of our political economy.”

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Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“I have grown tired of the notion of an ally. I prefer the language of an “accomplice.” An ally loves you from a distance. An accomplice loves you up close. We need allies to make the transition to accomplices. An ally is someone who has unpacked her personal privilege but hasn’t yet made the link to institutional issues and is not willing to risk anything besides her mental comfort. An accomplice rolls up her sleeves and engages in the work that is beyond her. She’ll march in the streets, yes. But an accomplice also faces her own participation in whiteness, acknowledges it, and then looks beyond that personal acknowledgment to identify how her awareness can be applied to changing the systems and mindsets that prop up the system.”

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Book:On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope
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“In the South, we knew our adversary would stop at nothing to silence our activism. We knew we could never match his readiness to annihilate our resistance. So we ceded him that ground and challenged him instead to defend himself against the work of loving peace.”

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Book:Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America
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“When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me.”

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Author:Lawrence Wright
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“In a manner akin to the influence of Tiger Woods on the other side of the Atlantic, Thierry Henry has helped kick down a few of the remaining bigoted stereotypes. Through his undisputable class and dignity, Henry has made a deep-seated difference to race relations in this country. Racism will flounder whenever white children grow up with a black man as their hero. That so few comment on Henry's colour is a silent tribute to his impact.”

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Author:Pete Gill
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“in race relations, the single gesture and the single individual are more often than not doomed to failure. Only the group and the long-term, undeviating policy make much headway. ... if you want to make the world a better place, the first thing you must accept is the fact that you cannot transcend your limitations as an individual.”

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Book:Color blind: a white woman looks at the Negro
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“Strictly speaking, one cannot legislate love, but what one can do is legislate fairness and justice. If legislation does not prohibit our living side by side, sooner or later your child will fall on the pavement and I'll be the one to pick her up. Or one of my children will not be able to get into the house and you'll have to say, "Stop here until your mom comes here." Legislation affords us the chance to see if we might love each other.”

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Author:Maya Angelou
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“The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has not interest, and pretends none, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual.”

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Book:I Love Myself when I Am Laughing ... and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader
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“Once in a while, God sends a good white person my way, even to this day. I think it's God's way of keeping me from becoming too mean. And when he sends a nice one to me, then I have to eat crow. And honey, crow is a tough old bird to eat, let me tell you.”

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Book:Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years
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“Only men of moral and mental force, of a patriotic regard for the relationship of the two races, can be of real service as ministers in the South. Less theology and more of human brotherhood, less declamation and more common sense and love for truth, must be the qualifications of the new ministry that shall yet save the race from the evils of false teaching.”

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Author:Fannie Barrier Williams
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“In Sumter and other counties [in South Carolina] the whites are resorting to intimidation and violence to prevent the colored people from organizing for the elections. The division there is still on the color line. Substantially all the whites are Democrats and all the colored people are Republicans. There is no political principle in dispute between them. The whites have the intelligence, the property, and the courage which make power. The negroes are for the most part ignorant, poor, and timid. My view is that the whites must be divided there before a better state of things will prevail.”

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Author:Rutherford B. Hayes
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“... one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance... I now realize that this feeling inevitably takes possession of one in the bitter struggle for equality. Indeed, I share it. Yet I wonder how we can expect total acceptance to step full grown from the womb of prejudice, with no embryo or infancy or childhood stages.”

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Author:Sarah-Patton Boyle
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“I think there's a lot of shame in American race relations. There's a lot of suppressed guilt that lashes itself out still. I see that all the time, and whereas opposed to sort of trying to address the issue in an up-front way, they're attacking and thus perpetuating the problem thinking that they're being sophisticated and post-racial, when, in fact, they're being completely regressive.”

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Author:Danny Strong
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