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Racism Quotes

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Racism Quotes

“Sometimes we say we want an end to hate or racism or sexism. But we all participate in keeping these structures alive. If everyone decided to relinquish the past what would happen to people who feel that there hasn't been proper atonement made to them? And what happens to the person who feels that the constant atonement is their identity?”

“The civil rights situation is like a pregnancy. It will get worse, I believe, before it gets better. What the usual pregnancy comes to is a decent baby. That is what we all hope will be the end product of this stress. It is customary, at the end of a pregnancy, to have for your pains a decent baby.”

“There was not one cause for our internment, but many - a deep-seated racial prejudice working on top of fear, distrust, and greed. So how is one to say exactly where history begins or ends? It is all slow oscillations, curves, and waves which take so long to reveal themselves ... like watching a tree grow.”

“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.”

“To have one's race brutally treated for so many years, even after the end of slavery and segregation, people are going to rise up with violence to attain what they believe is rightfully theirs. The most important thing at this time is raising the awareness of everyone; people need to be educated everywhere about all aspects of racism and how it affects people still today.”

“I don't think you can explain why all these other sports and college basketball have a fair representation of African American coaches, but college football doesn't. You can dig and scramble and scratch, but at the end of the day I think it's just pure, old-fashioned racism.”

“I went back to a small town in Poland where my dad grew up. It was a very traumatic experience for me as a young man to know that my father's family were killed by Nazis, killed by Hitler. And that left, you know, if not intellectually, at least an emotional part of me which said, God, we have got to do everything we can to end this kind of horrific racism or anti-Semitism. And I have spent much of my life trying to fight that.”

“There are three things, and it depends on the group that we're talking about, but there's history, there's culture, and then there's social networks. So, you know, historically black and white, they worship together until about the end of slavery, and people started moving out into separate churches. But it was because of discrimination and racism and such that blacks began to establish their own denominations and their own churches.”

“I think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm X came to symbolize Black urban America, its culture, its politics, its militancy, its outrage against structural racism and at the end of his life, a broad internationalist vision of emancipatory power far better than any other single individual that he shared with DuBois and Paul Robeson, a pan-Africanist internationalist perspective.”

“Diversity means, when the left teaches it, the people responsible for building America and maintaining it get the short end of the stick from now on. With this singular American culture that people came and wanted to be part of, they were proud, couldn't wait to become Americans, tears in their eyes when it happened. It was a special place. Defending it now, defending that America, defending our cultural, defending our founding, defending all of the things that made this country great is now called racism or xenophobia or hate.”

“The struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism without struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression.”

“I believe we should work to end all racism in American society and staunchly defend the inherent rights of every person. I have clearly stated in prior interviews that I abhor racial discrimination and would have worked to end segregation. Even though this matter was settled when I was 2, and no serious people are seeking to revisit it except to score cheap political points, I unequivocally state that I will not support any efforts to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

“I hate racial discrimination most intensely and all its manifestations. I have fought all my life; I fight now, and will do so until the end of my days. Even although I now happen to be tried by one, whose opinion I hold in high esteem, I detest most violently the set-up that surrounds me here. It makes me feel that I am a Black man in a White man's court. This should not be I should feel perfectly at ease and at home with the assurance that I am being tried by a fellow South African, who does not regard me as an inferior, entitled to a special type of justice.”

“The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course—it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth. What will come after, what kind of structure will be the foundation for alternate forms of social organization we cannot yet know. We are living in an age of unprecedented transformation. We are in the process of becoming.”

“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.”

“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.”