Quotessence
Home / Topics / Racism Quotes

Racism Quotes

Browse 3161 quotes about Racism.

Related topics

PeopleWhiteBlackThinkingIfsKnowsSexismRaceCountryAmericaMenWorldWayProblemDiscriminationWantPersonsBelieveColorHumansStillsPrejudiceBigotryHateHas BeensPoliticalAfrican AmericanHomophobiaFeelsFormMeanPovertyDifferentFightingChildrenLongLooksShouldWarJusticeAnti RacismCommunityCultureEndsKindStatesIssuesNeedsViolenceBlack PeopleHatredMadeSlaveryYearsEvilTryingWellsDoeGroupsFirstsSocialBlack RacismCapitalismIgnoranceSocial JusticeAnti RacistEconomicNationsOppressionClassHeartIndividualKidsRightsTodayWhite RacismFactsGivingMindReasonSeemsSometimesCenturyFacesIdeasMaySkinsSouthXenophobiaCertainImportantInjusticeLittlesMatterPresidentReligiousUnited StatesMightUnitedVictimmore

Racism Quotes

“In a manner akin to the influence of Tiger Woods on the other side of the Atlantic, Thierry Henry has helped kick down a few of the remaining bigoted stereotypes. Through his undisputable class and dignity, Henry has made a deep-seated difference to race relations in this country. Racism will flounder whenever white children grow up with a black man as their hero. That so few comment on Henry's colour is a silent tribute to his impact.”

MenChildrenMadeCountryGrowsSidesBlackDifferencesWhiteRaceClassGrowing UpInfluenceFootballHeroRacismDignityRelationImpactSilentWoodsSoccerAnalysisKicksColourCommentStereotypeTigersRace RelationsTribute
Author:Pete Gill
Create image

“in race relations, the single gesture and the single individual are more often than not doomed to failure. Only the group and the long-term, undeviating policy make much headway. ... if you want to make the world a better place, the first thing you must accept is the fact that you cannot transcend your limitations as an individual.”

IfsWorldWantFirstsLongFactsIndividualTermRaceAcceptingGroupsPolicyRacismRelationLimitationLong TermGesturesDoomedBetter PlaceRace Relations
Book:Color blind: a white woman looks at the Negro
Create image

“It wasn't just this street that she was afraid of or that was bad. It was any street where people were packed together like sardines in a can. And it wasn't just this city. It was any city where they set up a line and say black folks stay on this side and white folks on this side, so that the black folks were crammed on top of each other—jammed and packed and forced into the smallest possible space until they were completely cut off from light and air. It was any place where the women had to work to support the families because the men couldn't get jobs and the men got bored and pulled out and the kids were left without proper homes because there was nobody around to put a heart into it. Yes. It was any place where people were so damn poor they didn't have time to do anything but work, and their bodies were the only source of relief from the pressure under which they lived; and where the crowding together made the young girls wise beyond their years. It all added up to the same thing, she decided—white people. She hated them. She would always hate them.”

CitiesPovertyRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationRace RelationsWhitesNeighborhoodsOvercrowding
Book:The Street
Create image

“Yet another tactic was offered the Negro. He was encouraged to seek unity with the millions of disadvantaged whites of the South, whose basic need for social change paralleled his own. Theoretically, this proposal held a measure of logic, for it is undeniable that great masses of southern whites exist in conditions scarcely better than those which afflict the Negro. But the rationale of this theory wilted under the heat of fact. The need for immediate change was more urgently felt and more bitterly realized by the Negro than by the exploited white. As individuals, the whites could better their situation without the barrier that society places in front of a man whose racial identification by color is inescapable. Moreover, the underprivileged southern whites saw the color that separated them from Negroes more clearly than they saw the circumstances that bound them together in mutual interest. Negroes were therefore forced to face the fact that, in the South, they must move without allies; and yet the coiled power of state force made such a prospect appear both futile and quixotic.”

PoorPovertyRacismSouthCivil RightsAfrican AmericansBlacksRace Relations
Book:Why We Can't Wait
Create image

“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.”

AmericaRacePovertyRacismDiscriminationFascismAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationRace Relations
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
Create image

“Oh, Lawd, I done forgot Harlem! Say, you colored folks, hungry a long time in 135th Street--they got swell music at the Waldorf-Astoria. It sure is a mighty nice place to shake hips in, too. There's dancing after supper in a big warm room. It's cold as hell on Lenox Avenue. All you've had all day is a cup of coffee. Your pawnshop overcoat's a ragged banner on your hungry frame. You know, downtown folks are just crazy about Paul Robeson! Maybe they'll like you, too, black mob from Harlem. Drop in at the Waldorf this afternoon for tea. Stay to dinner. Give Park Avenue a lot of darkie color--free for nothing!”

RacePovertyRacismHungerAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsHarlemHotelsWaldorf Astoria
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
Create image

“We Negroes of America are tired of a world divided superficially on the basis of blood and color, but in reality on the basis of poverty and power—the rich over the poor, no matter what their color. We Negroes of America are tired of a world in which it is possible for any group of people to say to another: "You have no right to happiness, or freedom, or the joy of life." We are tired of a world where forever we work for someone else and the profits are not ours. We are tired of a world where, when we raise our voices against oppression, we are immediately jailed, intimidated, beaten, sometimes lynched. Nicolás GuiIlén has been in prison in Cuba, Jacques Roumain, in Haiti, Angelo Herndon in the United States. Today a letter comes from the great Indian writer, Raj Anand, saying that he cannot be with us here in Paris because the British police in England have taken his passport from him. I say, we darker peoples of the earth are tired of a world in which things like that can happen.”

RacePovertyPowerRacismDiscriminationOppressionAfrican AmericansBlacksRace Relations
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
Create image

“The problem is everyone, even Black people, believes that Black poverty is the worst poverty in the world, and Black urban poverty, forget it, and all urban Blackness always scans as poverty, which means people only love us as fetish. No one is sentimental about poor Black people unless they're wise and country and you could put a photograph of them on a porch with a quilt behind them in a museum.”

RacePovertyRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsUrban LifeUrban PovertyBlack Poverty
Book:The Office of Historical Corrections
Create image

“anyway, the whole world knows, european & non-european alike, the whole world knows that nobody loves the black woman like they love farrah fawcett-majors. the whole world dont turn out for a dead black woman like they did for marilyn monroe. (actually, the demise of josephine baker waz an international event, but she waz also a war hero)”

DeathWomenRaceRacismCelebrationBlack WomenAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsAfrican American Women
Author:Ntozake Shange
Create image

“Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in the passenger seat of his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live. Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castille. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence. The stream of names of those who have been killed at the hands of the police feels endless, and I become overwhelmed when I consider all the names we do not know—all of those who lost their lives and had no camera there to capture it, nothing to corroborate police reports that named them as threats. Closed cases. I watch the collective mourning transpire across my social-media feeds. I watch as people declare that they cannot get out of bed, cannot bear to go to work, cannot function as a human being is meant to function. This sense of anxiety is something I have become unsettlingly accustomed to. The familiar knot in my stomach. The tightness in my chest. But becoming accustomed to something does not mean that it does not take a toll. Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.”

GriefRaceDespairAnxietyRacismPoliceMourningSympathyBiasLaw EnforcementAfrican AmericansBlack Lives MatterRace RelationsPolicemenGunsWhitesShootings
Author:Clint Smith
Create image

“It was not only colored people who praised John, since they could not, John felt, in any case really know; but white people also said it, in fact had said it first and said it still. It was when John was five years old and in the first grade that he was first noticed; and since he was noticed by an eye altogether alien and impersonal, he began to perceive, in wild uneasiness, his individual existence.”

Self EsteemIdentityRacismRespectSelf RespectIndividualismRace RelationsAngstRacism In AmericaRace And Racism In AmericaSelf ActualizationRespectabilityIdentity CrisisRacism And CultureIdentity Confusion
Book:Go Tell It on the Mountain
Create image

“In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear--fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the very visibility without which we also cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson--that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.”

FearWomenRaceSilenceRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksRace Relations
Book:The Cancer Journals
Create image

“If origin defines race, then we are all Africans – we are all black.”

LifeInspirationalPhilosophyTruthRaceEvolutionWords Of WisdomRacismBrainy QuotesHumanismHumanitarianAfrican AmericanHuman LifeHuman RaceHumanistBlack PeopleAfricaHumanitarianismBlack HistoryRace RelationsLove And KindnessRace And Racism In AmericaSocial PsychologyHumanismoAfricanHumanitarian CrisisRacial DiscriminationRacial ProfilingRacial PrejudiceOrigin Of LifeOrigin Of SpeciesHumanitarian EffortsHumanitarian InterventionRacial InjusticeRacesRacial EqualityRace IssuesRacial IdentityHumanitariansHumanitarian ActivitiesRace Of LifeRacial SuperiorityOrigin Of Human Rights
Book:We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
Create image

“Sentiments that glorify humanity know no racial distinction.”

LifeInspirationalPhilosophyCharacterTruthRaceEvolutionWords Of WisdomRacismBrainy QuotesHuman RightsHumanismHumanitarianAfrican AmericanHuman LifeHuman RaceSentimentsHumanistBlack PeopleAfricaHumanitarianismHumanity And SocietyBlack HistoryRace RelationsLove And KindnessRace And Racism In AmericaSocial PsychologyHumanismoAmbitionsAfricanHumanitarian CrisisRacial DiscriminationRacial ProfilingRacial PrejudiceOrigin Of LifeOrigin Of SpeciesHumanitarian EffortsHumanitarian InterventionRacial InjusticeRacesRacial EqualityRace IssuesRacial IdentityHumanitariansHumanitarian ActivitiesRace Of LifeRacial SuperiorityOrigin Of Human Rights
Book:We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
Create image

“In the biological sense, race does not exist.”

LifeInspirationalPhilosophyCharacterTruthRaceEvolutionWords Of WisdomRacismBrainy QuotesHuman RightsHumanismHumanitarianAfrican AmericanHuman LifeHuman RaceSentimentsHumanistBlack PeopleAfricaHumanitarianismHumanity And SocietyBlack HistoryRace RelationsLove And KindnessRace And Racism In AmericaSocial PsychologyHumanismoAmbitionsAfricanHumanitarian CrisisRacial DiscriminationRacial ProfilingRacial PrejudiceOrigin Of LifeOrigin Of SpeciesHumanitarian EffortsHumanitarian InterventionRacial InjusticeRacesRacial EqualityRace IssuesRacial IdentityHumanitariansHumanitarian ActivitiesRace Of LifeRacial SuperiorityOrigin Of Human Rights
Book:We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
Create image

“It is character that should be the sole measure of judgement in the society of thinking humanity, and nothing short of that would do.”

LifeInspirationalPhilosophyCharacterTruthRaceEvolutionWords Of WisdomRacismBrainy QuotesHuman RightsHumanismHumanitarianAfrican AmericanHuman LifeHuman RaceSentimentsHumanistBlack PeopleAfricaHumanitarianismHumanity And SocietyBlack HistoryRace RelationsCharacter BuildingLove And KindnessRace And Racism In AmericaSocial PsychologyHumanismoAmbitionsAfricanHumanitarian CrisisRacial DiscriminationRacial ProfilingRacial PrejudiceOrigin Of LifeOrigin Of SpeciesHumanitarian EffortsHumanitarian InterventionRacial InjusticeRacesRacial EqualityRace IssuesRacial IdentityHumanitariansHumanitarian ActivitiesRace Of LifeRacial SuperiorityOrigin Of Human Rights
Book:We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
Create image

“Call up the ever-pure, the effulgent and the ever-radiant character of true humanism in yourself and in others, and no racism shall have the power to thrive in such society even for a few seconds.”

LifeInspirationalPhilosophyCharacterTruthRaceEvolutionWords Of WisdomRacismBrainy QuotesHuman RightsHumanismHumanitarianAfrican AmericanHuman LifeHuman RaceSentimentsHumanistBlack PeopleAfricaHumanitarianismHumanity And SocietyBlack HistoryRace RelationsLove And KindnessRace And Racism In AmericaSocial PsychologyHumanismoAmbitionsAfricanHumanitarian CrisisRacial DiscriminationRacial ProfilingRacial PrejudiceOrigin Of LifeOrigin Of SpeciesHumanitarian EffortsHumanitarian InterventionRacial InjusticeRacesRacial EqualityRace IssuesRacial IdentityHumanitariansHumanitarian ActivitiesRace Of LifeRacial SuperiorityOrigin Of Human Rights
Book:We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
Create image

“If not as a true human, let me tell you as a Biologist, color of the skin does not define an individual’s intelligence – it does not define an individual’s ambitions - it does not define an individual’s dreams – and above all, it does not define an individual’s character.”

LifeInspirationalPhilosophyCharacterTruthRaceEvolutionWords Of WisdomRacismBrainy QuotesHuman RightsHumanismHumanitarianAfrican AmericanHuman LifeHuman RaceSentimentsHumanistBlack PeopleAfricaHumanitarianismHumanity And SocietyBlack HistoryRace RelationsLove And KindnessRace And Racism In AmericaSocial PsychologyHumanismoAmbitionsAfricanHumanitarian CrisisRacial DiscriminationRacial ProfilingRacial PrejudiceOrigin Of LifeOrigin Of SpeciesHumanitarian EffortsHumanitarian InterventionRacial InjusticeRacesRacial EqualityRace IssuesRacial IdentityHumanitariansHumanitarian ActivitiesRace Of LifeRacial SuperiorityOrigin Of Human Rights
Book:We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
Create image

“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
Create image

“Offsprings of Africa (Black History Sonnet) If a black family lives long enough in a cold climate, in about 100 generations or so, their descendants will be born white. This is how the white people were born, Because we all come from a black mother. No matter where we live on earth, We're all Africans - our homeland, Africa. Till you get this anthropological fact, You are but a traitor to earth. Black History is World History, We are all offsprings of Africa.”

MankindDiversityRacismHuman RaceAfricaWhite SupremacyBlack HistoryRace RelationsAnthropologyAfrican
Book:Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch
Create image

“The implications of the true story are existential and corrosive to our larger national myth. To understand that the most costly war in this country's history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of America as a beacon of freedom. How does one face this truth or forge a national identity out of it?”

WarFreedomRaceRacismSlaveryMythologyCivil WarRace Relations
Book:We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Create image

“That evening there were police outside the building in which I spoke, and in the air the rising tension of race that is peculiar to the South. It had been rumored that some of the local citizenry were saying that I should be run out of town, and that one of the sheriffs agreed, saying, "Sure, he ought to be run out! It's bad enough to call Christ a bastard. But when he calls him a nigger, he's gone too far!"... ...Nevertheless, I remember with pleasure the courtesy and kindness of many of the students and faculty at Chapel Hill and their lack of agreement with the anti-Negro elements of the town. There I began to learn at the University of North Carolina how hard it is to be a white liberal in the South.”

PoetryRacismSouthPoetsAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesLiberals
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
Create image

“Despite his increasing wealth (the money came in so fast he could scarcely keep track of it), Matthew maintained close contact with the merchants and manufacturers. He sent out private letters periodically to prominent men in the Southern business world in which he told of the marked psychological change that had come over the working classes of the South since the birth of the K. of N. He told how they had been discontented and on the brink of revolution when his organization rushed in and saved the South. Unionism and such destructive nostrums had been forgotten, he averred, when The Warning had revealed the latest danger to the white race. Of course, he always added, such work required large sums of money and contributions from conservative, substantial and public-spirited citizens were ever acceptable. At the end of each letter there appeared a suggestive paragraph pointing out the extent to which the prosperity of the New South was due to its "peculiar institutions" that made the worker race conscious instead of class conscious, and that with the passing of these "peculiar institutions" would also pass prosperity. This reasoning proved very effective, financially speaking.”

RaceClassRacismPropagandaAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesClass ConsciousnessRace Consciousness
Book:Black No More
Create image

“There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.”

AcceptanceRacismSuperiorityAfrican AmericansRace RelationsInferiorityWhite People
Book:The Fire Next Time
Create image

“There is in Moscow a great curiosity for things American, and a great sympathy for things Negro. So, being both an American and a Negro, I am met everywhere with friendly questions from children and adults as to how we live at home. Is there really a crisis, with people hungry and ragged when there are in America so many factories, so much technique, so much wheat, and cotton and livestock? How can that be? Do they actually kill people in electric chairs? Actually lynch Negroes? Why? The children in the Moscow streets, wise little city children, will oft times gather around you if you are waiting for a streetcar, or looking into a shop window. They will take your hand and ask you about the Scottsboro boys, or if you like the Soviet Union and are going to stay forever. Sometimes as you pass a group of children playing, they will stop and exclaim, "Negro!" But in wonder and surprise a long ways from the insulting derision of the word "Nigger" in the mouths of America's white children. Here, the youth in the schools are taught to respect all races.”

ChildrenRacismPrejudiceSoviet UnionAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsMoscowUssr
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
Create image

“Don't you believe in nonviolence?' I asked. "'Yes,' said Miss Minnie, 'when the other parties are nonviolent, too. But when I have just come out of a funeral parlor from looking at a little small black boy shot three times by a full-grown cop, I think it is about time I raised my pocketbook and strike at least one blow for freedom.”

ChildrenViolenceRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityRace Relations
Book:The Return of Simple
Create image

“To the Po'lice In case you are wondering the answer is yes: you have hurt us. Deeply. Just as you intended: you and those who sent you. You do know by now that you do not send yourself? I imagine your Designers sitting back in the shadows laughing as we weep. Though usually devoid of feeling, they are experiencing a sensation they almost enjoy: they get to witness, by twisted enchantment, dozens of strong black mothers weeping. They planned and nurtured your hatred and fear and focused the kill shot. Then watched you try to explain your innocence on TV. It is entertainment for them. They chuckle and drink Watching you squirm. They have tied you up in a bag of confusion from which you will never escape. It’s true you are white, but you are so fucking poor, and dumb, to boot, they say. A consideration that turns them pink with glee. (They have so many uses planned for the poor, white, and dumb: you would be amazed). You and the weeping mothers have more in common than you might think: the mothers know this. They have known you far longer than you have known them. After centuries, even those in the shadows, your masters, offer little mystery. If you could find your true courage you might risk everything to sit within a circle, surrounded by these women. Their eyes red from weeping, their throats raw. (They might strike you too, who could swear they wouldn’t?) Their sons are dead and it was you who did the deed. Scary enough. But within that enclosure Naked to their grief Is where you must center If you are ever To be freed.”

PoetryPoemRacismMurderPoliceAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityRace RelationsPolicing
Book:Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart
Create image

“It was wrong. It was wrong to pay the same dime yet have to walk to the back of the bus. It was wrong to have to pass a "white" school to go to a "colored" school. It was wrong to have Colored and White signs. It was wrong that Emmett Till was murdered. It was wrong that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was dynamited. It was wrong that Medgar Evers was shot in the back and bled to death in his own driveway. And whatever was not right could be, if not corrected, then certainly reproved by people with kinder hearts, better minds and the courage to speak out for their beliefs.”

PoetryRacePoemRacismPrejudiceAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesJim Crow
Book:Acolytes
Create image

“this country might have been a pio neer land once. but. there ain’t no mo indians blowing custer’s mind with a different image of america. this country might have needed shoot/ outs/daily/ once. but. there ain’t no mo real/white/ allamerican bad/guys. just. u & me. blk/and un/armed. this country might have been a pion eer land. once. and it still is. check out the falling gun/shells on our blk/tomorrows.”

AmericaPoetryPoemRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityRace Relations
Author:Sonia Sanchez
Create image

“here among them the americans this baffling multi people extremes and variegations their noise restlessness their almost frightening energy how best describe these aliens in my reports to The Counselors disguise myself in order to study them unobserved adapting their varied pigmentations white black red brown yellow the imprecise and strangering distinctions by which they live by which they justify their cruelties to one another charming savages enlightened primitives brash new comers lately sprung up in our galaxy how describe them do they indeed know what or who they are do not seem to yet no other beings in the universe make more extravagant claims for their importance and identity”

PoetryCultureCommunityRacePoemRacismRace RelationsAmericans
Book:Collected Poems
Create image

“One of the recurring themes in the history of colonial repression is the way in which the threat of real or imagined violence towards white women became a symbol: European women's "sexual fear" appears to arise in special circumstances of unequal power structures at times of particular political pressure − when the dominant power group perceives itself as threatened and vulnerable. Protecting the virtue of white women was the pretext for instituting draconian measures against indigenous populations [whilst] the actual level of rape and sexual assault bore no relation to the hysteria that the subject aroused. White women provided a symbol of the most vulnerable property known to white man, and it was to be protected from the ever-encroaching black man at all costs.”

RaceHistoryPsychologyRacismSociologyRace Relations
Book:Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History
Create image

“When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.”

RaceFamilyRacismBitternessAfrican AmericansRace RelationsFathersWhitesSons
Book:Notes of a Native Son
Create image