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Racism Quotes

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Racism Quotes

“Shouldn't the American leadership be addressing what is happening in America, with its domestic policies on racism, discrimination, illegal monitoring, solitary confinement, torture, Guantanamo Bay and any other social and political issues related to the American society not directly connected to Islam? American Muslims must speak out and be involved as well in international policies and, through their institutions, they should raise their voice. This is the way you serve the community.”

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Author:Tariq Ramadan
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“One of the ongoing crises in America is institutional racism. We have a very broken criminal justice system. We live in a country where there are more people in jail than any other country on Earth. There are some 2.2 million people currently incarcerated and they are disproportionally African American and Hispanic. Unarmed African Americans have been abused and sometimes killed while in police custody. Clearly these are issues that must be dealt with and changed.”

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Author:Bernie Sanders
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“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America - there's the United States of America.”

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Author:Barack Obama
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“No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.”

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Book:Three African-American Classics: Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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“In today's climate in our country, which is sickened with the pollution of pollution, threatened with the prominence of AIDS, riddled with burgeoning racism, rife with growing huddles of the homeless, we need art and we need art in all forms. We need all methods of art to be present, everywhere present, and all the time present.”

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Author:Maya Angelou
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“Racism as a form of skin worship, and as a sickness and a pathological anxiety for America, is so great, until the poor whites -- rather than fighting for jobs or education -- fight to remain pink and fight to remain white. And therefore they cannot see an alliance with people that they feel to be inherently inferior.”

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Author:Jesse Jackson
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“When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation’s slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free - (Chapter 9).”

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Author:Shirley Chisholm
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“Right-wing propagandists like Limbaugh and Coulter are essentially entertainers, entertainers who stimulate prejudice, selfishness and meanness the way a comedian works for laughs or a tragedian plays for tears. Theirs is a new art form, exclusive to America and bewilderingly successful. In place of traditional conservative ideology, they offer their audience partisan belligerence and a complete package of mail-order hatreds, designed for the conceptually and ethically impaired.”

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Author:Hal Crowther
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“Today the governments of Latin America should be ashamed of not havingexterminated the indigenous, at the end of the twentieth century, because weexist at the end of this century. We are not myths of the past, ruins in thejungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims ofintolerance and racism.”

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Author:Rigoberta Menchu
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“I feel sorry for Obama because he's still got to fight the innate racism of Americans. I mean, did you see his first speech, when he got made President and they put all that bullet proof glass in front of him? I think that shows you how racist America still is. Just because he's black doesn't mean he's going to shoot anybody.”

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Author:Frankie Boyle
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“There should be a class on drugs. There should be a class on sex education-a real sex education class-not just pictures and diaphragms and 'un-logical' terms and things like that.....there should be a class on scams, there should be a class on religious cults, there should be a class on police brutality, there should be a class on apartheid, there should be a class on racism in America, there should be a class on why people are hungry, but there are not, there are classes on gym, physical education, let's learn volleyball.”

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Author:Tupac Shakur
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“We must never remain silent in the face of bigotry. We must condemn those who seek to divide us. In all quarters and at all times, we must teach tolerance and denounce racism, anti-Semitism and all ethnic or religious bigotry wherever they exist as unacceptable evils. We have no place for haters in America -- none, whatsoever.”

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Author:Ronald Reagan
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“We treat racism in this country like it's a style that America went through. Like flared legs and lava lamps. Oh, that crazy thing we did. We were hanging black people. We treat it like a fad instead of a disease that eradicates millions of people. You've got to get it at a lab, and study it, and see its origins, and see what it's immune to and what breaks it down.”

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Author:Chris Rock
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“Let me offer you, metaphorically, two magic wands that have sweeping powers to change society. With one wand you could wipe out all racism and discrimination from the hearts and minds of white America. The other wand you could wave across the ghettoes and barrios of America and infuse the inhabitants with Japanese or Jewish values, respect for learning, and ambition. ... I suggest that the best wand for society and for those who live in the ghettoes and barrios would be the second wand.”

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Author:Richard Lamm
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“I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism.”

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Author:Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“I think the black man in America wants to be recognized as a human being; and it's almost impossible for one who has enslaved another to bring himself to accept the person who used to pull his plow, who used to be an animal, subhuman, who used to be considered as such by him-it's almost impossible for that person in his right mind to accept that person as his equal.”

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Author:Malcolm X
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“Racism is when you have laws set up, systematically put in a way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a people. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing... then it will be done, but not until then.”

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Author:Spike Lee
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“I thought about all of the times, growing up, when I had sat in class and heard a white classmate say, "Well, my ancestors didn't own slaves," or heard a political commentator on television say, "Why are we still talking about slavery? People need to get over it." Or a politician say, "We can't wallow in the past. It's time to focus on the future." When I hear these deflections, I think of all the ways this country attempts to smother conversations about how its past has shaped its present. How slavery is made to sound as if it happened in a prehistoric age instead of only a few generations ago.”

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Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
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“...the other calling, for me, is that we have to begin this process of truth-telling, that we have to recognize that we can’t get well if we don’t diagnose the disease. I mean, we have this instinct for quick fix and quick cure. And if you don’t know what’s wrong with you, you’re not going to know whether the cure that you’ve been prescribed is sufficient. And I think this process of diagnosing the many ways that we are not healthy is not something we should fear but something we should embrace, because once we’ve done that, I think we have the capacity, the genius, the strength, the ingenuity, the wherewithal to begin to address these maladies, this illness, and emerge as a healthier society, a healthier nation, a healthier place in the world for everyone. And that’s what animates the work that we’re trying to do now.”

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Author:Bryan Stevenson
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“I come from a land whose democracy from the very beginning has been tainted with race prejudice born of slavery, and whose richness has been poured through the narrow channels of greed into the hands of the few. I come to the Second International Writers Congress representing my country, America, but most especially the Negro peoples of America, and the poor peoples of America—because I am both a Negro and poor. And that combination of color and of poverty gives me the right then to speak for the most oppressed group in America, that group that has known so little of American democracy, the fifteen million Negroes who dwell within our borders. We are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word Fascism—for the American attitude towards us has always been one of economic and social discrimination: in many states of our country Negroes are not permitted to vote or to hold political office. In some sections freedom of movement is greatly hindered, especially if we happen to be sharecroppers on the cotton farms of the South. All over America we know what it is to be refused admittance to schools and colleges, to theatres and concert halls, to hotels and restaurants. We know Jim Crow cars, race riots, lynchings, we know the sorrows of the nine Scottsboro boys, innocent young Negroes imprisoned some six years now for a crime that even the trial judge declared them not guilty of having committed, and for which some of them have not yet come to trial. Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

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Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
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“The reality is that most people of color learn early in America that we will have to work twice as hard to get half as far, and when we fail, no one will help us fall up. Immigrants, people of color, and women learn early that in order to make it in Amreeka you have to daft punk it through life. You have to do everything harder, better, faster, stronger, and smarter. Those are just the rules. The streets of Amreeka aren't paved with gold; they're paved with blood. As an immigrant, you'll take a beating but you'll be like Rick Ross and keep hustling. if Bob works eight hours a day, you work ten. If Samantha works late on Friday, then you work on Saturday. You go twenty feet just to get to ten feet.”

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Book:Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
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“I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.”

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Author:Martin Luther King Jr.
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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.”

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Book:Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
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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.”

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Book:The Fire Next Time
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“I'm about as American as chicken korma, apple pie, and chai, but even after forty years I'm still told to "go back." Where, exactly? In America, who (and what) are you when you're both "us" and "them"? When I'm a native but seen as a foreigner? When I'm a citizen but also seen as a perpetual suspect? When I'm your neighbor but also seen as an invader? When I'm a cultural creator but also seen as an eraser of white identity and European civilization?”

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Book:Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
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“America didn’t start burning right now, and it is not burning because Black people are 'overreacting' or committing 'violence'. America has always been burning for many people. If you haven’t felt that America has always been burning, then you are – consciously or unconsciously – part of the structural, systemic, and calculated racism and marginalization committed against Blacks and other marginalized people in America. If you haven’t always felt that America was burning, you are part of the problem and you may want to consider joining the camp of those looking for solution to put an end to this nightmarish reality.”

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Author:Louis Yako
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“We, the human race, must recognize the truth of—and embrace—the principle of color-blind individualism. We must acknowledge that race does not matter—that skin pigmentation, hair texture, facial bone structure, and so forth—signify zero regarding the only human attribute that does matter: Strength of character. There is only one race—the human race.”

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Book:American Racism: Its Decline, Its Baleful Resurgence, and Our Looming Race War
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