Quotessence
Home / Topics / Racism In America Quotes

Racism In America Quotes

Browse 302 quotes about Racism In America.

Racism In America Quotes

“Disparate treatment of minorities should be discussed in every school in the country. Do the boys understand the difference between news and propaganda? Misinformation is rampant on the internet, and the biggest provider of ‘fake news’ is the President of the United States, Ronald John.”

FearRaceSocial JusticeCivil RightsInequalityPolice BrutalityRacism In AmericaRacial ProfilingRacial PrejudiceBlacklivesmatter
Book:Betrayal In Black
Create image

“La resolución del conflicto entre mujeres blancas y negras no dará comienzo hasta que todas las mujeres acepten que un movimiento feminista racista y clasista es una farsa, una tapadera para el sometimiento continuado de las mujeres a los principios patriarcales y la aceptación pasiva del statu quo. La sororidad necesaria para librar la revolución feminista solo se conseguirá cuando todas las mujeres se zafen de la hostilidad, los celos y la competencia mutua que nos ha llevado a ser vulnerables, débiles e incapaces de imaginar nuevas realidades. Esa sororidad no puede forjarse solo con palabras. Es el resultado de un crecimiento y un cambio continuados. Es un objetivo que alcanzar, un proceso de transformación. Y ese proceso empieza por la acción, por el rechazo personal de cada mujer a aceptar ningún conjunto de mitos, estereotipos y falsas suposiciones que niegan los elementos comunes y compartidos de su experiencia humana, que la privan de la capacidad para experimentar la unidad de toda la vida, que le niegan la capacidad para cerrar las brechas creadas por el racismo, el sexismo o el clasismo y que le niegan la capacidad de cambiar. El proceso empieza por la aceptación personal de cada mujer de que a las mujeres estadounidenses, a todas sin excepción, se las socializa para que sean racistas, clasistas y sexistas, en diversos grados, y por entender que calificarnos de feministas no cambia el hecho de que debemos esforzarnos de manera consciente por desembarazarnos del legado de socialización negativa.”

FeminismRacism In AmericaClasismoAntirracismoFeminismo Interseccional
Book:Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
Create image

“En gång i världen var USA det förlovade landet i världen för invandrare som vi. Vi har slitit som djur av tvång och av tacksamhet, och se hur de behandlar oss nu! Utlänningar blir behandlade som kriminella, om det ska vara vår tids Amerika åker jag hellre tillbaka till Indien.”

RacistAmerican DreamDiversity And InclusionRacism In AmericaRacial DiscriminationRacism And CultureImmigrant ExperienceUsa ImmigrationThe Promise Of A Better Life
Author:Marc Levy
Create image

“I confront the question of whether DEI initiatives are divisive and ineffective. The answer is yes on both counts, but not for the narratives propagated by the American ruling class of oligarchs. Rather, we should consider how DEI initiatives have worked just enough to keep the status quo intact for those at the top, while planting the seeds of division between a significant percentage of marginalized and impoverished white people and every other marginalized and impoverished group in the U.S. and beyond. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”

PowerRacismElitesEquityDiversity And InclusionRacism In AmericaDiversity QuotesEquity And InclusionRuling Class
Author:Louis Yako
Create image

“[whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies. The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury.”

AmericaRaceRacismAmerican HistoryBlack HistoryRacism In AmericaBlacknessWhiteness
Book:Between the World and Me
Create image

“Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants—their homes, their hobbies—up close. I don’t know what it means to grow up with a black president, social networks, omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed the killer of Michael Brown, you said, “I’ve got to go.” And that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your age my feeling was exactly the same. And I recall that even then I had not yet begun to imagine the perils that tangle us. You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us. Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrilling. This is what the rappers mean when they pronounce themselves addicted to “the streets” or in love with “the game.” I imagine they feel something akin to parachutists, rock climbers, BASE jumpers, and others who choose to live on the edge. Of course we chose nothing. And I have never believed the brothers who claim to “run,” much less “own,” the city. We did not design the streets. We do not fund them. We do not preserve them. But I was there, nevertheless, charged like all the others with the protection of my body. The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power. They would break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies.”

Racism In AmericaBlackness
Book:Between the World and Me
Create image

“A jail within a jail. In those long hours, he struggled over Reverend King's equation. "Throw us in jail and we will love you ... But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win our freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory." No he could not make that leap to love. He understood neither the impulse of the proposition nor the will to execute it.”

RacismBlack Lives MatterCivil Rights MovementRacism In AmericaMartin Luther King JrBirmingham
Book:The Nickel Boys
Create image

“Okay, first of all, they don't "consider" Jefferson Davis racist, he was President of the Confederacy, his racism is not up for any sort of fucking debate. Despite the narrative of some Southern Revisionists, the Civil War was fought almost entirely on the issue of slavery. If you're the leader of the, "we think black people should be slaves" side of that war, then you're a racist — not "racist, question mark," not even "racist, period," but "racist, exclamation point" — racist!”

RacismRacism In AmericaConfederate States Of AmericaJefferson Davis
Author:T.J. Kirk
Create image

“The new black conservatives assume that without affirmative action programs, white Americans will make choices on merit rather than on race. Yet they have adduced no evidence for this. Most Americans realize that job-hiring choices are made both on reasons of merit and on personal grounds. And it is this personal dimension that is often influenced by racist perceptions. Therefore the pertinent debate regarding black hiring is never "merit vs. race" but whether hiring decisions will be based on merit, influenced by race-bias against blacks, or on merit, influenced by race-bias, but with special consideration for minorities and women, as mandated by law. In light of actual employment practices, the black conservative rhetoric about race-free hiring criteria (usually coupled with a call for dismantling affirmative action mechanisms) does no more than justify actual practices of racial discrimination.”

Racism In AmericaAffirmative Action1993Black ConservatismHiring Practice
Book:Race Matters
Create image

“The parents of rich kids tended to be more patriotic because they had more to lose if the country went under. The poor parents were far less patriotic, and then often professed their patriotism only because it was expected or because it was the way they had been raised. Subconsciously they knew it wouldn't be any better or worse for them if the Russians or the Germans or the Chinese or the Japanese ran the country, especially if they had dark skin. Things might even improve.”

PatriotismRacism In AmericaEconomic Disparity
Author:Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
Create image

“I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.”

RacismSlaveryImmigrationCivil RightsImmigrantsAmerican HistoryLgbtqRacism In AmericaRefugeesLgbtqiaRacial PrejudiceMelting PotBlacklivesmatter
Book:Black Boy
Create image

“We’re all Malkuthians. And you know what? We’re all Theropods too.” “Wh-wh-what’s that?” “You know… Theropods. We’ve all got sharp teeth, we all walk on two legs, we all have arms shorter than our legs. For the most part, we’ve got two eyes, two hands, and a tail. I mean, some of us have more fingers and some of us have a horn or two, but how different does that really make us? We’re all just people, that’s what I’m saying. There shouldn’t be all this division and categorization. It just leads to more hate. It leads to more dysfunction. People look at me and think I’m privileged. People look at you and think you’re untouchable. They look at the two of us together and they think it’s fire and ice. It’s not right.”

RacismEqualityRacism In AmericaClassismInterracial RomanceInterracial
Book:The Destroyer of Worlds: An Answer to Every Question
Create image

“On one side of the tracks was the commercial center: the college, city hall, businesses, white residential neighborhoods-carefully kept that way, first by deliberate redlining and later by Jim Crow... Through the sixties, the city of Commerce was known as a "sundown town"- any Black person found of the streets after dark was in danger of being lynched. The only place where Black citizens were safe from the threat of white violence was also the only place Black people were legally allowed to reside: Norris Community, known fondly by younger generations as "the Hole".”

RacismRacism In AmericaJim CrowRacism And CultureRedlining
Book:A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom
Create image

“...Jim Crow was the American equivalent of South African apartheid and the racial laws passed in Germany under the Nazi regime of the 1930s. And these similarities are not merely coincidental. Historians have uncovered growing evidence showing that racist parties around the world, including in Nazi Germany, were inspired and guided by the example of American Jim Crow.”

Racism In AmericaNazi GermanyJim Crow
Book:Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance
Create image

“She trained the girls in her Girl Scout troop to believe that they could be anything, and she went to lengths to prevent negative stereotypes of their race from shaping their internal views of themselves and other Negroes. It was difficult enough to rise above the silent reminders of Colored signs on the bathroom doors and cafeteria tables. But to be confronted with the prejudice so blatantly, there in that temple to intellectual excellence and rational thought, by something so mundane, so ridiculous, so universal as having to go to the bathroom...In the moment when the white women laughed at her, Mary had been demoted from professional mathematician to a second-class human being, reminded that she was a black girl whose piss wasn't good enough for the white pot.”

Race RelationsRacism In AmericaJim Crow
Book:Hidden Figures
Create image

“Jim Crow and mass incarceration have similar political origins...both caste systems were born in part, due to desire among white elites to exploit the resentments, vulnerabilities and racial biases of poor and working-class whites for political or economic gain. Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate and strategic effort to deflect anger and hostility that have been brewing against the white elite away from them and toward African Americans. The birth of mass incarceration can be traced to a similar political dynamic. Conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s sought to appeal to the racial biases and economic vulnerabilities of poor and working-class whites through racially coded rhetoric on crime and welfare. In both cases, the racial opportunists offered few, if any, economic reforms to address the legitimate economic anxieties of poor and working-class whites, proposing instead a crackdown on the racially defined "others." In the early years of Jim Crow, conservative white elites competed with each other by passing ever more stringent and oppressive Jim Crow legislation. A century later, politicians in the early years of the drug war competed with each other to prove who could be tougher on crime by passing ever harsher drug laws- a thinly veiled effort to appeal to poor and working-class whites who, once again, proved they were willing to forego economic and structural reform in exchange for an apparent effort to put blacks back "in their place.”

CrimeRacism In AmericaWar On DrugsJim CrowMass Incarceration
Book:The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Create image

“The races are like America's children. White people are the firstborn, so they were Dad's favorite. Black people are the second kids, the abused ones, so they still hate Dad. Latinos are the third, caught in the middle and always trying to make peace between the other siblings. Asians are the youngest, and get good marks in school, but basically are just trying to keep their heads down and not get involved. And Native Americans are the old uncle who owns a house and everyone else in the family was like, "He's not using that! Let's move in!”

AmericaRaceRacismAmerican HistoryAmerican CultureRacism In AmericaStereotypesEthnicityAmericansRacial PrejudiceRacism And CultureStereotypingEthnic StereotypesU S Culture
Book:The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America
Create image

“Saying something is 'politically correct' is often a way of dismissing the voices of the oppressed.”

RacismPrejudiceOppressionLgbtLgbtqOppressedPolitical CorrectnessRacism In AmericaHomophobiaBiasedPolitically CorrectRacism QuotesBiasesPrejudicesLgbt QuotesLgbt RightsRacism And CultureMarginalizationSilencingRacism QuoteDismissalPolitically IncorrectOppression QuotesPolitically Correct CultureEthnocentrismSilencing DissentBiased OpinionEthnocentricity
Author:DaShanne Stokes
Create image

“Bigotry and sexism destroy the unity needed for a nation to live.”

CountryGaySurvivalRacismPrejudiceUnityHuman RightsDiscriminationCivil RightsLgbtBigotrySexismBiasLgbtqTogethernessNationLesbianRacism In AmericaHomophobiaGay RightsBiasedSexistRacism QuotesBiasesBigotsPrejudicesUnity QuotesLgbt QuotesLgbt RightsRacism And CultureLesbiansDiscrimination QuotesBigotUnity Of All PeopleSexism QuotesRacism QuoteHuman Rights QuotesCivil Rights QuotesPrejudicedSexists
Author:DaShanne Stokes
Create image

“If you can't see past my name, you can't see me.”

CultureNamesRaceIdentityRacismPrejudiceDiscriminationRacistBigotryStereotypeRace RelationsRacism In AmericaStereotypesRace And Racism In AmericaNameRacism QuotesBigotsPrejudicesRace In AmericaRacism And CultureIdentity PoliticsName CallingDiscrimination QuotesIdentity QuotesCulture IdentityBigotNamingRacism QuoteStereotypingFamily NameDiscriminatingRacism In The WestEthnic StereotypesPrejudicedRacist PeopleStereotypicalPrejudgmentRacial StereotypesPrejudging
Author:DaShanne Stokes
Create image

“The strange often uncalled for collective artificial fear European American’s have of African American’s is the genuine fear African American’s should (and at all times) harbor. It is our Kings and Queens who must forever remain vigilant of the imminent danger posed by those in the said collective.”

RaceRacismAfrican AmericanBlack PeopleAfrican AmericansRacism In AmericaRacism QuotesAfrican American AuthorsRacism And CultureWhite People
Author:A.K. Kuykendall
Create image

“It's not the fact that some people disagree with the protests. That is as much a right as the protests themselves. It is the hateful, profane, condescending way some have expressed their discontent that baffles me. How do you criticize actions you've deemed disrespectful and divisive and an affront to civilized behavior with rhetoric to the same end? That's like the devil judging the Grim Reaper for harvesting souls.”

RacismRacistRacism In AmericaCarlos WallaceRace And Racism In AmericaRacial DiscriminationRacism And CultureRacism Quote
Author:Carlos Wallace
Create image

“Black Diamonds Black gemstones pillaged from Mother Earth and mined from Kemet, Crystallized into rare gems under centuries of pressure. Yet, clarity remains pure under the brutal heat of history And the alluvial mining along the coastlines of black beaches. Whitewashing while extracting Nubian gems from sable sands, Twelve million carats separated from the soil of black lands.”

PrejudiceRacism In AmericaRacism And CultureBlack ExcellenceBlack People In America
Book:Black Lives, Lines, and Lyrics
Create image