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Racism Quotes

Browse 3161 quotes about Racism.

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Racism Quotes

“For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.”

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Author:Peggy McIntosh
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“I don't like that word 'discovery.' ... Sinatra was the first one to call Ray Charles a genius, he spoke of 'the genius of Ray Charles.' And after that everybody called him a genius. They didn't call him a genius before that though. He was a genius but they didn't call him that. ... If a white man hadn't told them, they wouldn't've seen it. ... Like, you know, they say Columbus discovered America, he didn't discover America.”

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Author:Gayl Jones
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“No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.”

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Author:Faith Ringgold
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“Ironically, white America will catapult books about race to the top of the best-seller list, even as racism remains a national open wound. Obsession ain't solution, however, because reading even at its most intense and verisimilitudinous is vicarious, and once you close the book you're off the hook.”

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Book:Skin Deep: Black Women & White Women Write About Race
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“People say to me 'you're successful, what are you crying about?'. I'm crying about the people. I'm crying about their daughters. Our daughters, as one family. What good is it. What good is anything that everyone can't have. Every ism. They think we're done with racism. What about elitism, what about separatism, what about classism? That's all.”

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Author:Kanye West
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“At times I feel it almost impossible not to despond entirely of there ever being a better, brighter day for us. None but those who experience it can know what it is - this constant, galling sense of cruel injustice and wrong. I cannot help feeling it very often, - it intrudes upon my happiest moments, and spreads a dark, deep gloom over everything.”

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Author:Charlotte Forten Grimke
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“Blacks are supposed to rejoice whenever our way of life becomes more mainstream. We seldom do. For we see in it a sanctioning that can only be granted by white society. In other words: If you're white, it's all right. If you're black, step back.”

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Book:It's the Little Things: Everyday Interactions that Anger, Annoy, and Divide the Races
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“In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven't lynched somebody then you can't be called a racist. If you're not a bloodsucking monster, then you can't be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters.”

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Author:Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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“The blind spot for the in the Southern Progressive Movement - as for that matter in the national [progressive] movement - was the Negro, for the whole movement in the South coincided paradoxically with the crest of the wave of racism. Still more important to the association of the two movements was the fact that their leaders were often identical. In fact, the typical Progressive reformer rode to power in the South on a disenfranchising or white-supremacy movement.”

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Author:C. Vann Woodward
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“I felt pretty good growing up. I didnt feel a lot of prejudice or racism. But I do remember, if there was going to be a movie or a television show with Asian characters, I would go out of my way to avoid them, because they portrayed all Asians as either ridiculously good or ridiculously bad; you know, the whole Charlie Chan-Fu Manchu thing.”

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Author:David Henry Hwang
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“When I wrote 'The Giver,' it contained no so-called 'bad words.' It was set, after all, in a mythical, futuristic, and Utopian society. Not only was there no poverty, divorce, racism, sexism, pollution, or violence in the world of 'The Giver'; there was also careful attention paid to language: to its fluency, precision, and power.”

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Author:Lois Lowry
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“One of the big mistakes they made in Europe is that the circumstances in which you most frequently read or hear the word "race" or "racism" in Europe applies to Muslims. Which is not a race. It is a religion. You can convert to this. You cannot convert your race. I could become a Muslim. I could not become a Chinese person or a black person. So they constantly use that in Europe.”

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Author:Fran Lebowitz
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“It's so hard for me to even acknowledge America without talking about race. If you look at our society, if you look at the prisons, if you look at the poverty and which side of the line the majority of people are, we have to acknowledge how we divide ourselves up, that there's racism alive in this country. And it's not in the law. It's in our minds. And that's what we have to actively battle.”

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Author:Dave Matthews
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“I talked a lot early on in my career about intersectionality and how racism and classism and sexism and homophobia and capitalism are all connected with each other, and they're these crazy systems that are feeding on each other and are also damaging. I can't even go into the whole spectrum of it. But I feel like kids today are so much more savvy about that conversation. And I'm so thrilled when I get to meet younger people who are doing that so much better than I did.”

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Author:Kathleen Hanna
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“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.”

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Author:Howard Zinn
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“Unfortunately, the greater consciousness among Whites about Black equality has not carried over to the new victims of racism - Muslims and Immigrants. There is no racial enlightenment for these groups, which are huge. Millions of Muslims and an equal number of immigrants, who whether legal or illegal, face discrimination both legally from the government and extra-legally from White Americans - and sometimes Black and Hispanic Americans. The Democratic Presidential candidates are avoiding these issues in order to cultivate support among White Americans.”

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Author:Howard Zinn
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“We need to organize ourselves and protest against existing order - against war, against economic and sexual exploitation, against racism, etc. But to organize ourselves in such a way that means correspond to the ends, and to organize ourselves in such a way as to create kind of human relationship that should exist in future society. That would mean to organize ourselves without centralize authority, without charismatic leader, in a way that represents in miniature the ideal of the future egalitarian society.”

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Author:Howard Zinn
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