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Racism Quotes

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Racism Quotes

“Racism is no longer tolerated as normal, Islamophobia is no longer tolerated as normal, Homophobia is no longer tolerated as normal, Chauvinism is no longer tolerated as normal, Colonialism is no longer tolerated as normal - believe you me, this is the most human humanity have ever been in our 200,000 years long history.”

HumanityDiversityRacismPrejudiceSocial JusticeHuman RightsEqualityMisogynyHomophobiaWoke
Book:The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology
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“DNA & Race (Sonnet) Ancestral roots count for nothing, modern humans are identified by behavior. In the end, all roots lead to Africa - transcending roots we lay the human culture. Beyond markers of immediate biological family, DNA ancestry tests are practically meaningless. There is no genetic test for ethnicity - science declares sanctions on racism, not validation. There is no White DNA, Black DNA. There is no Muslim DNA, Jewish DNA. There is no Aryan DNA, Dravidian DNA. We're made of stuff of the stars, why do you still rot in the jungle gutter! If you are seeking validation for your bigotry and prejudice, all we scientists can offer you are directions to the nearest psychiatrist.”

HumanityRacismPrejudiceHuman RaceBigotryMulticulturalismAncestryEthnicityGenomeDna Test
Book:Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience
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“Cuando tenía doce años vi cómo se llevaban a una niña de la biblioteca pública porque era de tercera clase. La registraron y le vaciaron los bolsillos, que tenía llenos de páginas arrancadas de Cuento de Navidad, de Dickens. Me impresionó su acto de vandalismo, pero aún más su determinación de acceder a la literatura. El sistema de clases fomenta la ambición, me explicó más tarde el tío Thomas. ¿Habría deseado tan desesperadamente leer el libro esa niña si lo tuviera permitido? --- Capitulo 5.”

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Book:A Language of Dragons
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“Sonnet 1284 Human chest contains miracles of the cosmos, Animal chest contains but the brutal jungle. Choice is yours, what shall you facilitate - a world of brutality or a world of miracle! Be a miracle or be an animal, choice is yours; In your veins brews the dream of civilization. The world is in dire need of miracle humans, There is no such thing as miracle animal. This ribcage ends up a prison most times, But it can also be a sanctuary - a paradise. Entertain hate, and you are a prisoner; Give in to love, lo you usher into light! Abandon divide, adopt but life. Contain the world in your chest of light.”

HumanityAcceptanceDiversityRacismPrejudiceSocial JusticeDiscriminationHumanistInclusionHate Crime
Book:Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One
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“[The Gaze of an Invisible Stranger] In western Europe and north America In the cities of cruelty, racism, freedom & democracy, Cities of exile and alienation, You see many young people Who’d rather die than greet a stranger, You observe how they master the art of ignoring And not acknowledging the humanity of anyone Who is not their height and weight Whose features, skin color, and eyes are different than theirs… In return, you observe cities filled with older people Who delight at a nod or greeting from any stranger Who are hungry for the slightest kind human touch From any by passerby… Making you, the Invisible Stranger, wonder: Did these same elderly folks raise the young ones? Are they merely inheriting a world of their creation? Do the young ones realize The isolation, loneliness, and desolation awaiting them tomorrow? [Original poem published in Arabic on January 3, 2023, at ahewar.org]”

HumanityCommunityCompassionLonelinessRacismAgingExclusionOlder PeopleArabic PoetryAgism
Author:Louis Yako
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“I reach for the water and drag it across the table. I shouldn’t criticise or mock, but I do feel antagonistic toward the woman whose eyes follow the jug as it slides away from her. Of course, I know for each finger pointing at someone else, there are three pointing back at you, but these other fingers aren’t usually being licked clean at the time.”

SpiritualitySelf HelpInspirational LifeRacismSelf RealisationNon DualityDublinBallymun
Book:Swami Premananda & The Temple of Whom
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“Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.”

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Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“World Without 9/11 (The Sonnet) Better a kindhearted fool than a heartless tool, Kindness is born when we aren't afraid of burning. Coldness looks appealing on nuts and bolts, On human beings it is absolutely unbecoming. A world without 9/11 and January 6, Begins with a heart without hate. Cultural and racial profiling don't ensure security, True security is born when we act as love incarnate. The helpless, forgotten, discriminated and destitute, Are my brothers and sisters, and I won't stop, Till I lift them up to take their rightful place, Upon the fabric of society, with my last blood drop. Each and every breath of mine is public property. Once I die for the people, then I can live in serenity.”

KindnessAcceptanceDiversityRacismPrejudiceEqualityWhite SupremacyHate CrimeHumanist PoetryInsurrection
Book:Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World
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“I wasn't taught to hate white people. That dead body hanging from the platform broke the heart and wounded the spirit of every black man and woman who passed by. But I suspected that it also hurt right-thinking white people. Both parents had spoken well of fair-minded white people - my namesake, Jim O'Reilly, and Flake Cartledge - so I knew better than to blame a whole race for the rotten deeds of a few. When some blacks talked about whites as devils, I could see the source of their wrath. I could still see the dead man outside the courthouse on the square. But I couldn't turn the fury into hatred. Blind hatred, my mother had taught me, poisons the soul. I kept hearing her say, 'If you're kind to people, they'll be kind to you.”

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Book:Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King
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“WONDERLAND It is a person's unquenchable thirst for wonder That sets them on their initial quest for truth. The more doors you open, the smaller you become. The more places you see and the more people you meet, The greater your curiosity grows. The greater your curiosity, the more you will wander. The more you wander, the greater the wonder. The more you quench your thirst for wonder, The more you drink from the cup of life. The more you see and experience, the closer to truth you become. The more languages you learn, the more truths you can unravel. And the more countries you travel, the greater your understanding. And the greater your understanding, the less you see differences. And the more knowledge you gain, the wider your perspective, And the wider your perspective, the lesser your ignorance. Hence, the more wisdom you gain, the smaller you feel. And the smaller you feel, the greater you become. The more you see, the more you love -- The more you love, the less walls you see. The more doors you are willing to open, The less close-minded you will be. The more open-minded you are, The more open your heart. And the more open your heart, The more you will be able to Send and receive -- Truth and TRUE Unconditional LOVE.”

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Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness. She scoured Nigerian websites, Nigerian pro files on Facebook, Nigerian blogs, and each click brought yet another story of a young person who had recently moved back home, clothed in American or British degrees, to start an investment company, a music production business, a fashion label, a magazine, a fast-food franchise She looked at photographs of these men and women and felt the dull ache of loss, as though they had prised open her hand and taken some thing of hers. They were living her life.”

HomeRaceTravelRacismImmigrationHomesicknessHomesickEmigration
Book:Americanah
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“Many people have asked me recently what I make of all the workplaces who were so quick to roll back on their DEI practices. My answer is that these are very likely the kind of workplaces that have abused, misapplied, and co-opted DEI initiatives all along. It is proof that they were never serious about such initiatives in the first place. For them, DEI work was just playing the game, and the game they play is quick to change when the rules of that game are changed. [From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”

ChangeRacismDiversity And InclusionCorporate CultureCorporate GovernanceRacism And CultureCorporate GreedEquity And Inclusion
Author:Louis Yako
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“It is also apparent, especially to those familiar with the old order, that all these improvements have evolved from a foundation of social relations and class power built around the architecture of white supremacy. Vestiges of that foundation remain visible within current arrangements, and it can seem commonsensical, therefore, to suspect that it continues to shape the limits of the new structures of routine life. That is one reason, for example, that discussions of the relation between race and life chances in the contemporary United States gravitate so easily toward allusion to the explicit racial hierarchies that defined the Jim Crow era as an alternative to deep examination of the discrete processes that ground and reproduce inequality in the present. But commonsense rests on projection of the familiar and thereby stresses continuity over change. Unquestioned power and deference persist in the region, but their connection to race is no longer straightforward or easily predictable. The tendency to mistake superficially familiar imagery for actual continuity threatens to obscure how the present differs most meaningfully from the past.”

ChangeRaceRacismCommon SenseWhite SupremacyContinuityJim CrowPolitical Change
Book:The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
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“It is bemusing to observe when formative periods of one's past become grist for scholarly, ideological, and casual interpretation and debate and are constructed and reconstructed from the standpoint of current concerns and debates. That's also inevitable, on one level what history is. A danger, however, is that, when reckoning with the past becomes too much like an allegory, its nuances and contingencies, its essential open-endedness, can disappear. Then history can become either a narrative of inevitable, progressive unfolding to the present or, worse, a tendentious assertion that nothing has ever changed, and both divesting the past of its discrete foreignness and contingency or reducing it to the warm-up act for the present are handmaidens of ruling class power. The danger of that tendency is especially great in moments of ruling class triumphalism such as this one.”

ChangeHistoryRacismSegregationJim Crow
Book:The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
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“There are forces that have always attempted, and ultimately failed, to make America static and rigid. But America has proven to be elastic. Our ancestors have always had to push and stretch America to accommodate its many residents and communities. We now have to do our part. If any of you have been active students of US history, you know that with every two steps we march forward toward progress, we always get pushed one step back. The racially anxious men and women with hoods, tiki torches, and business suits will do everything in their power to violently chokehold and drag America back to 1953. This is the year before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. I'm convinced that 1953 is also the year that many enemies of diversity and progress believe America was allegedly "great.”

AmericaChangeProgressRacismExpansionMagaBrown V Board Of Education
Book:Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
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“Racist” and “antiracist” are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos. No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other. We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. We can knowingly strive to be an antiracist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.”

ChangeRacismSelf AwarenessSelf CriticismAntiracismSelf ExaminationRacistsAntiracists
Book:How to Be an Antiracist
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“Race and racism are power constructs of the modern world. For roughly two hundred thousand years, before race and racism were constructed in the fifteenth century, humans saw color but did not group the colors into continental races, did not commonly attach negative and positive characteristics to those colors and rank the races to justify racial inequity, to reinforce racist power and policy. Racism is not even six hundred years old. It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early. But racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known. It is hard to find a place where its cancer cells are not dividing and multiplying. There is nothing I see in our world today, in our history, giving me hope that one day antiracists will win the fight, that one day the flag of antiracism will fly over a world of equity. What gives me hope is a simple truism. Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose. But if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chance to be forever free.”

HopeChangeRaceRacismThreatsAntiracismInequity
Book:How to Be an Antiracist
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“Asking antiracists to change their perspective on racism can be as destabilizing as asking racists to change their perspective on the races. Antiracists can be as doctrinaire in their view of racism as racists can be in their view of not-racism. How can antiracists ask racists to open their minds and change when we are closed-minded and unwilling to change?”

ChangeRacismOpen MindednessChanging Your MindAntiracismClosed MindednessChanging Minds
Book:How to Be an Antiracist
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“But before we can treat, we must believe. Believe all is not lost for you and me and our society. Believe in the possibility that we can strive to be antiracist from this day forward. Believe in the possibility that we can transform our societies to be antiracist from this day forward. Racist power is not godly. Racist policies are not indestructible. Racial inequities are not inevitable. Racist ideas are not natural to the human mind.”

FaithBeliefChangeProgressConfidenceRacismTransformationAntiracism
Book:How to Be an Antiracist
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“We've been called radicals, terrorists. We've been dismissed as an impossible fringe movement. But now we are a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational, multi-faith mass movement united in demanding change, in demanding accountability, in demanding that our police, our government, our country recognize that Black lives do indeed matter. (From election victory speech)”

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Author:Cori Bush
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“We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.... What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

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Author:Robert F. Kennedy
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“There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this -- which will not be tomorrow and will not be today and may very well be never -- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

LoveAmericaPoliticsRaceCompassionAcceptanceRacismAfrican AmericansRace RelationsWhite People
Book:The Fire Next Time
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“Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm: What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears. An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that.”

SufferingRaceCompassionEmpathyRacismPrisonAfricaMarxismVictimsJewsPlantationsInternationalismAfricansEuropeansRosa LuxemburgJewish QuestionDh LawrenceMathilde VerneRootless Cosmopolitanism
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing”-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.”

SpiritualityCompassionMoralityRacismCapitalismEconomicsMaterialismMilitarism
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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