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Racism Quotes

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Racism Quotes

“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.”

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Book:How to Be an Antiracist
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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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“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.”

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Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the welder, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.”

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Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“I have heard a lot of white people say they don't see color. I used to think that was a good thing, as in we don't consider the color of someone's skin when deciding how we feel about them. But then I started to realize it's okay to acknowledge our differences. Also, it's a lie. We all see race, and that's fine. If we deny someone's race, we're denying a part of who they are as a person and not acknowledging the person as a whole, and that can slip into dangerous territory. If we ignore someone's race, we're ignoring the different perspectives they bring.”

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Book:That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America
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“As the rich get richer, the rest of us will be left in increasingly precarious situations. In the global recession that is upon us, the powerful will double down on their control of state and cultural apparatus, They will be determined to repress, or co-opt, the tremulous expressions of resistance that are gaining volume as the people rise of against death. The issue of co-option is pertinent. Our articulations of dissent too often mirror the parameters of our oppression, reproducing oppressive systems, unwittingly reinforcing them, or indeed 'diverse' them, to make them more 'inclusive' when in truth the need to dissolve.”

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Book:What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice
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“The problem with racial discrimination, though, is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristics from their race. The question is not, can you, given an individual's skin color, hair texture, or language, infer something about their ancestry or origin. That is a question of biological systematics -- of lineage, taxonomy, of racial geography, of biological discrimination. Of course you can -- and genomics as vastly refined that inference. You can scan any individual genome and infer rather deep insights about a person's ancestry, or place of origin. But the vastly more controversial question is the converse: Given a racial identity -- African or Asian, say -- can you infer anything about an individual's characteristics: not just skin or hair color, but more complex features, such as intelligence, habits, personality, and aptitude? /I/ Genes can certainly tell us about race, but can race tell us anything about genes? /i/ To answer this question, we need to measure how genetic variation is distributed across various racial categories. Is there more diversity _within_ races or _between_ races? Does knowing that someone is of African versus European descent, say, allow us to refine our understanding of their genetic traits, or their personal, physical, or intellectual attributes in a meaningful manner? Or is there so much variation within Africans and Europeans that _intraracial_ diversity dominates the comparison, thereby making the category "African" or "European" moot? We now know precise and quantitative answers to these questions. A number of studies have tried to quantify the level of genetic diversity of the human genome. The most recent estimates suggest that the vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs _within_ so-called races (i.e., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) within racial groups (the geneticist Richard Lewontin had estimated a similar distribution as early as 1972). Some genes certainly vary sharply between racial or ethnic groups -- sickle-cell anemia is an Afro-Caribbean and Indian disease, and Tay-Sachs disease has a much higher frequency in Ashkenazi Jews -- but for the most part, the genetic diversity within any racial group dominates the diversity between racial groups -- not marginally, but by an enormous amount. The degree of interracial variability makes "race" a poor surrogate for nearly any feature: in a genetic sense, an African man from Nigria is so "different" from another man from Namibia that it makes little sense to lump them into the same category.”

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Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
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“The conundrum of the twenty-first (century) is that with the best intentions of color blindness, and laws passed in this spirit, we still carry instincts and reactions inherited from our environments and embedded in our being below the level of conscious decision. There is a color line in our heads, and while we could see its effects we couldn’t name it until now. But john powell is also steeped in a new science of “implicit bias,” which gives us a way, finally, even to address this head on. It reveals a challenge that is human in nature, though it can be supported and hastened by policies to create new experiences, which over time create new instincts and lay chemical and physical pathways. This is a helpfully unromantic way to think about what we mean when we aspire, longingly, to a lasting change of heart. And john powell and others are bringing training methodologies based on the new science to city governments and police forces and schools. What we’re finding now in the last 30 years is that much of the work, in terms of our cognitive and emotional response to the world, happens at the unconscious level.”

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Book:Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
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“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?”

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Book:We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
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“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.”

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Book:Black No More
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“What would be wicked would be to say, 'I will not give this person a job because he belongs to this category of people, and there's some kind of statistical tendency for this category of person to be different from that category...' Treat them as individuals! Look at the qualifications of this individual, and forget about the group, race, whatever you want to call it, to which he belongs.”

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Author:Richard Dawkins
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“Let us have peace." But there was the black man looming like a dark ghost on the horizon. He was the child of force and greed, and the father of wealth and war. His labor was indispensable, and the loss of it would have cost many times the cost of the war. If the Negro has been silent, his very presence would have announced his plight. He was not silence. He was in usual evidence. He was writing petitions, making speeches, parading with returned soldiers, reciting his adventures as slave and freeman. Even dumb and still, he must be noticed. His poverty has to be relieved, and emancipation in his case had to mean poverty. If he had to work, he had to have land and tools. If his labor was in reality to be free labor, he had to have legal freedom and civil rights. His ignorance could only be removed by that very education which the law of the South had long denied him and the custom of the North had made exceedingly difficult. Thus civil status and legal freedom, food, clothes and tools, access to land and help to education, were the minimum demands of four million laborers, and these demands no man could ignore, Northerner or Southerner, Abolitionist or Copperhead, laborer or captain of industry. How did the nation face this paradox and dilemma?”

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Book:Black Reconstruction in America
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“This growing self-respect has inspired the Negro with a new determination to struggle and sacrifice until first-class citizenship becomes a reality. This is the true meaning of the Montgomery Story. One can never understand the bus protest in Montgomery without understanding that there is a new Negro in the South, with a new sense of dignity and destiny.”

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Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“My grandmother, Vivian, and her siblings were the first Native American children in the Port Angeles school system. It was not an easy integration. They were bullied and beaten daily by the other children, having stones and slurs hurled at them with no one stepping in. When Lillian went to the White principal about this, it was clear he didn't see it as severe. I wonder if he dared to utter the words "kids will be kids" in front of an angry Bear Mother trying to protect her cubs. When he finally agreed to act, his generous solution was to release the siblings ten minutes earlier than everyone else, to give them a head start on their run home. It didn't always work.”

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Book:Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity
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“With my white friends, I’m always half Mexican. They never say I’m half Irish. Never say I’m half white. Like I’m tainted halfway from the standard. It’s like when I was a kid and I thought vanilla ice cream meant no flavor, like it was the base of all of the flavors. But vanilla is a bean. Like chocolate is a bean. Like cinnamon is a root. All roots and beans. All flavors. There is no base. No ice cream without a flavor.”

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Book:The Music of What Happens
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“One can tell a great deal about a country by what it remembers. By what graces the wall of its museums. And what monuments have privileged placement in parks or central traffic intersections. And what holidays and patriotic songs are the bane and balm to generations of school children. Yet one learns even more about a nation by what it forgets. What moments of evil, disappointment, and defeat are downplayed or eliminated from the national narratives. Often in the United States the issues of race and the centrality of African American culture are given short shrift in textbooks, popular chronicles, and national memories.”

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Book:A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump
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“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.”

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Book:Acolytes
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“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”

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Book:Collected Poems
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“Eventually, some black thinkers believe, this "separation" may be the shortest route to an authentic communication at some future date when blacks and whites can enter into encounters in which they truly speak as equals and in which the white man will no longer load every phrase with unconscious suggestions that he has something to "concede" to black men or that he wants to help black men "overcome" their blackness.”

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Book:Black Like Me
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“We are indeed a house divided. But the division between race and race, class and class, will not be dissolved by massive infusions of brotherly sentiment. The division is not the result of bad sentiment, and therefore will not be healed by rhetoric. Rather the division and the bad sentiments are both reflections of vast and growing inequalities in our socioeconomic system--inequalities of wealth, of status, of education, of access to political power. Talk of brotherhood and "tolerance" (are we merely to "tolerate" one another?) might once have had a cooling effect, but increasingly it grates on the nerves. It evokes contempt not because the values of brotherhood are wrong--they are more important than ever--but because it just does not correspond to the reality we see around us. And such talk does nothing to eliminate the inequalities that breed resentment and deep discontent.”

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Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“As the civil rights movement progressed, winning victory after victory in public accommodations and voting rights, it became increasingly conscious that these victories would not be secure or far-reaching without a radical improvement in the Negro's socioeconomic position. And so the movement reached out of the South into the urban centers of the North and the West. It moved from public accommodations to employment, welfare, housing, education--to find a host of problems the nation had let fester for a generation. But these were not problems that affected the Negro alone or that could be solved easily with the movement's traditional protest tactics. These injustices were imbedded not in ancient and obsolete institutional arrangements but in the priorities of powerful vested interests, in the direction of public policy, in the allocation of our national resources. Sit-ins could integrate a lunch counter, but massive social investments and imaginative public policies were required to eliminate the deeper inequalities.”

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Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“The politics of whiteness transcends the colour of anyone's skin. It is an occupying force in the mind. It is a political ideology that is concerned with maintaining power through domination and exclusion. Anyone can buy into it, just like anyone can choose to challenge it. [...] Those who perceive every critique of white-dominated politics to be an attack of them as a white person are probably part of the problem.”

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Book:Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race
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“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.”

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Book:Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History
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“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.”

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Book:Notes of a Native Son
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“Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors.”

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Book:Notes of a Native Son
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“I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My home made education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.”

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Book:The Autobiography of Malcolm X
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