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Whites Quotes

Browse 184 quotes about Whites.

Whites Quotes

“Why [...] is it so hard to build a society in which race does not matter? To the extent that Americans even ask themselves this question, they would say that it is because Americans--whites, especially--have not tried hard enough. And yet, how much harder can a people try? Today, after 50 years of trying, most whites cannot muster much more than exhausted resignation in the face of reports on school resegregation and yawning gaps in test scores or poverty rates. [...] If, generation after generation, Americans tend to segregate themselves, is it possible that the expectations for integration were not reasonable? If diversity is a source of tension are there risks in basing policies on the assumption that it is a strength? If non-white groups continue to advance race-based interests, is it wise for whites to continue to act as if they have none?”

RaceSocietyDiversityIntegrationSegregationGenerationWhites
Book:White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
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“It is impossible for white Americans to grasp the depths and dimensions of the Negro’s dilemma without understanding what it means to be a Negro in America. Of course it is not easy to perform this act of empathy. Putting oneself in another person’s place is always fraught with difficulties. Over and over again it is said in the black ghettos of America that “no white person can ever understand what it means to be a Negro.” There is good reason for this assumption, for there is very little in the life and experience of white America that can compare to the curse this society has put on color. And yet, if the present chasm of hostility, fear and distrust is to be bridged, the white man must begin to walk in the pathways of his black brothers and feel some of the pain and hurt that throb without letup in their daily lives.”

PainUnderstandingRaceEmpathyAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhites
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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“...If you are alone in this land, on foot, in miles of coming snow, wind, and branches and don't even know in which direction you'd run If from birth you've seen what men with guns, knives, and bombs are capable of doing for reasons you never wanted to understand If in this very same county's court of all-white witnesses, counsel, judge, and jurors it will forever be your word against theirs because there was no forensic testimony over who shot first If, yes, sometimes you can hear voices, not because you're insane, but in your culture you are a shaman, a spiritual healer, though in this very different land of goods and fears, your only true worth seems to be as a delivery man and soldier If, upon that first fateful exchange in these woods, your instinct, pushing pin to balloon, were to tell you it's now either you and your fatherless family of fourteen, or all of them Would you set your rifle down; hope the right, the decent, the fair thing on this buried American soil will happen? Or would you stay low, one knee cold, and do precisely as your whole life and history have trained? And if you did, would anyone even care what really happened that afternoon eight bodies plummeted to earth like deer?”

MenWarJusticeImmigrationVietnamWhites
Book:Whorled
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“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
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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.”

RaceClassRacismPropagandaAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesClass ConsciousnessRace Consciousness
Book:Black No More
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“When one-third of the population of the erstwhile Confederacy had consisted of the much-maligned Sons of Ham, the blacks had really been of economic, social and psychological value to the section. Not only had they done the dirty work and laid the foundation of its wealth, but they had served as a convenient red herring for the upper classes when the white proletariat grew restive under exploitation. The presence of the Negro as an under class had also made of Dixie a unique part of the United States. There, despite the trend to industrialization, life was a little different, a little pleasanter, a little softer. There was contrast and variety, which was rare in a nation where standardization had progressed to such an extent that a traveler didn't know what town he was in until someone informed him. The South had always been identified with the Negro, and vice versa, and its most pleasant memories treasured in song and story, were built around this pariah class. The deep concern of the Southern Caucasians with chivalry, the protection of white womanhood, the exaggerated development of race pride and the studied arrogance of even the poorest half-starved white peon, were all due to the presence of the black man. Booted and starved by their industrial and agricultural feudal lords, the white masses derived their only consolation and happiness from the fact that they were the same color as their oppressors and consequently better than the mudsill blacks.”

AmericaClassRacismPrejudiceSouthAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesConfederacyAmerican South
Book:Black No More
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“In 1680, four years after the [Bacon] rebellion, Virginia passed the Law for Preventing Negro Insurrections. It restricted the movement of enslaved people outside plantations; anyone found without a pass would be tortured with twenty lashes "well laid on" before being returned. At a time when white servants and African slaves often worked side by side, the hand of the law reached in to divide them. Prison time awaited "English, and other white men and women intermarrying with negros or mulattos." Already any indentured white servant caught running away with an enslaved African person was liable for their entire lost term of service, meaning that the servant risked becoming permanently unfree. The law separated the members of the lowest class by color and lifted one higher than the other. The goal, as it has been ever since, was to offer just enough racial privileges for white workers to identify with their color instead of their class. The Virginia legislature ended the penalties imposed on rebels for the insurrection of 1676, but only the white ones, removing a source of lingering solidarity among them.”

LawRaceClassSlaveryDivisionAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsLawsWhites
Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
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“These demographics presented real threats to white planters, including a potential cross-racial labor movement. Plantation work was close and intimate, and it fostered a troubling solidarity between the growing Black population and white indentured servants. White planters could not afford for such a dangerous bond to form--which is why in 1705 Virginia's legislature did as much to codify white privilege as it did to establish Black subjugation.”

ClassLaborSlaveryAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesWhite PrivilegeSlavesSlave Owners
Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
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“Nobody asked the Negro what he thunk about the whole business, by the way, nor the Indian, when I think of it, for neither of their thoughts didn't count, even through most of the squabbling was about them on the outside, for at bottom the whole business was about land and money, something nobody who was squabbling seemed to ever get enough of.”

MoneyRaceLandAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesNative AmericansIndians
Book:The Good Lord Bird
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“You don’t know they’ll be white. Maybe the Cloisters is full of Black people, and you’re the right person to knock on the door.” I could hear a cross laugh in Keller’s quiet voice. “I’m pretty sure that the people who set up shop in a castle are going to be white. Museums: last refuge of the ruling class.”

MuseumsElitesAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesRuling ClassCloistersElite Class
Book:All the Water in the World
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“The bus here because they lost Rosa Parks's bus." "Who lost Rosa Parks's bus?" "White people. Who the fuck else? Supposedly, every February when schoolkids visit the Rosa Parks Museum, or wherever the fuck the bus is at, the bus they tell the kids is the birthplace of the civil rights movement is a phony. Just some old Birmingham city bus they found in some junkyard. That's what my sister says, anyway." "I don't know." Cuz took two deep swallows of gin. "What you mean, 'You don't know'? You think that after Rosa Parks bitch-slapped white America, some white rednecks going to go out of their way to save the original bus? That'd be like the Celtics hanging Magic Johnson's jersey in the rafters of the Boston Garden. No fucking way.”

Civil RightsMuseumsAfrican AmericansRace RelationsWhitesArtifactsRosa ParksThe Henry Ford
Book:The Sellout
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“They were young black men, preying on other young black men. They had been informed, successfully, that they were worthless, and everyone who looked like them was equally without worth. Each sunrise brought a day without hope and each evening the sun set on a day lacking in achievement. Whites, who ruled the world, owned the air and food and jobs and schools and fair play, had refused to share with them any of life's necessities--and somewhere, deeper than their consciousness, they believed the whites were correct. They, the black youth, young lords of nothing, were born without value and would creep, like blinded moles, their lives long in the darkness, under the earth, chewing on roots, driven far from the light.”

Self EsteemEqualitySelf WorthAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesBlack Youth
Book:The Heart of a Woman
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“Glad someone shot deserved to be shot finally, George Wallace. After you send your basket of balms And berries for the girls the bomb buried in Birmingham, After you add your palms to the psalms & palm covered Caskets of the girls the bomb buried in Birmingham, I’ll muster a pinch of prayer for you. You are the blind Protagonist of a story that begins, “In my previous life My work involved returning runaway slaves to slavery,” And ends with the image of a black nurse pushing Your old ass in a wheelchair. Can you guess what black Folk passing empty cotton fields feel, George Wallace? I damn you with the opposite of that feeling. I keep thinking I’m confessing for the first time, the reason I fear you, And you keep asking why I’m telling this old story again.”

DeathPoetryFearPoemRacismMurderAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesGeorge Wallace
Book:American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
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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.”

PoetryRacePoemRacismPrejudiceAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesJim Crow
Book:Acolytes
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“David sees it as essential that a guide be able to find the balance between telling the truth and not pushing people so much that they shut down. He told me that when you challenge people, specifically white people's conception of Jefferson, you're in fact challenging their conception of themselves. ...David knows that some visitors to Monticello arrive with an understanding of history that is not only misguided but also harmful. He has a difficult time disentangling this from the current political moment. "That's not the story of who we are," he said, referencing the language of Make America Great Again, "but some people really, for whatever reason, they want to believe that and they want to go back there, right? They want to go back to something that never existed.”

TruthHistorySlaveryNostalgiaAmerican HistoryWhitesThomas JeffersonTour GuidesMonticelloTours
Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
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“Oona's mother resisted the notion that violence was happening, or that substantial violence was happening, and said that if there was violence it was because there were paid aggressors on the other side, saboteurs, and that they were trying to kill both our defenders and our people in general, and they were sometimes killing their own kind, to make us look bad, and also because some of their own kind supported us, and they killed them for that, and that the main point was separation, it was not that we were better than them, although we were better than them, how could you deny it, but that we needed our own places, where we could take care of our own, because our people were in trouble, so many of us in trouble, and the dark people could have their own places, and there they could do their own dark things, or whatever, and we would not stop them, but we would not participate in our own eradication, that had to end, and now there was no time to wait, now they were converting us, and lowering us, and that was a sign, a sign that if we did not act in this moment there would be no more moments left and we would be gone.”

ActionViolenceAggressionBlacksRace RelationsWhitesSabotagePeople Of Color
Book:The Last White Man
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“This is the ultimate tragedy of segregation. It not only harms one physically but injures one spiritually. It scars the soul and degrades the personality. It inflicts the segregated with a false sense of inferiority, while confirming the segregator in a false estimate of his own superiority.”

RacePsychologySuperiorityAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationRace RelationsInferiorityWhites
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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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.”

RaceFamilyRacismBitternessAfrican AmericansRace RelationsFathersWhitesSons
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.”

RaceRacismReflectionGuiltThoughtAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesThoughtfulness
Book:Notes of a Native Son
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“Oona's mother was active online, and listened to the radio, and watched the news, and she had come to believe she was on the inside, among the elect, those who understood the plot, the plot her daughter said was ridiculous, a plot that had been building for years, for decades, maybe for centuries, the plot against their kind, yes their kind, no matter what her daughter said, for they had a kind, the only people who could not call themselves a people in this country, and there were not so many of them left, and now it had arrived, and was upon them, and she was afraid, for what could she do, but there were those among them who would stand up, stand up and protect her, and she had to believe in them, and be ready, be ready as best she could, to preserve herself, and especially her daughter, her daughter who was the future....”

RaceBraveryDefenseBlacksRace RelationsWhitesConspiraciesPlots
Book:The Last White Man
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“Queer how that was always cropping up. Here she was highly respectable, married, mother of a small boy, and, in spite of all that, knowing all that, these people took one look at her and immediately got that now-I-wonder look. Apparently it was an automatic reaction of white people—if a girl was colored and fairly young, why, it stood to reason she had to be a prostitute. If not that—at least sleeping with her would be just a simple matter, for all one had to do was make the request. In fact, white men wouldn't even have to do the asking because the girl would ask them on sight. She grew angrier as she thought about it. Of course, none of them could know about your grandmother who had brought you up, she said to herself. And ever since you were big enough to remember the things that people said to you, had said over and over, just like a clock ticking, 'Lutie, baby, don't you never let no white man put his hands on you. They ain't never willin' to let a black woman alone. Seems like they all got a itch and a urge to sleep with 'em. Don't you never let any of 'em touch you.' Something that was said so often and with such gravity it had become a part of you, just like breathing, and you would have preferred crawling in bed with a rattlesnake to getting in bed with a white man. Mrs. Chandler's friends and her mother couldn't possibly know that, couldn't possibly imagine that you might have a distrust and a dislike of white men far deeper than the distrust these white women had of you. Or know that, after hearing their estimation of you, nothing in the world could ever force you to be even friendly with a white man. And again she thought of the barrier between her and these people. The funny part of it was she was willing to trust them and their motives without questioning, but the instant they saw the color of her skin they knew what she must be like; they were so confident about what she must be like they didn't need to know her personally in order to verify their estimate.”

SexRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsStereotypesWhites
Book:The Street
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“I just wish we could go back to when everybody was happy." "When was everybody happy? What time was that? Did I miss getting on that train?" He leaned a bit into her space. "No one was happy, Sidney. We were just a bunch of people getting on with it, living our lives with monsters on our backs. No, nobody was happy, and nobody told the truth." "What was the truth?" "That the world wasn't ever equal. And the white folks who made it that way--the ones who fought, silent and spitting, to keep it that way--refused all responsibility for what it meant. You can't imagine the inhumanity, horrors on top of horrors. People shot in the streets, in their homes, at grocery stores, so much that after a while some white folks just kind of shrugged. No one was fighting for our bodies. And it went on like that for so long I think we all started to believe that was just the way life was supposed to be. Trust me when I tell you, I've been black all over the world and I always knew what that meant. Not welcomed anywhere, and yet there ain't nowhere else to go. Damn, what a storm in the mind.”

HappinessRacePrejudiceInequalityBigotryAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsInhumanityWhites
Book:Sky Full of Elephants
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“Back in my day, when a white man gave you an opportunity, it came at a cost. You could be his chauffeur, but had to always be available to drive him around no matter if you had plans with your family or not. You could vote, but someone would break your legs if you didn' vote for the candidate they wanted you to. But either way, an opportunity was an opportunity, and if you took it, and learned how to play their game, you could be successful.”

RacismVotingOpportunitiesBlacksRace RelationsWhitesChauffeurs
Book:Black Buck
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“Nakia had come across Conrad and Juanita's box of Obama family memorabilia--novelty plates, buttons, their tickets to the first inauguration--when she helped them to pack up to move back to New Jersey. A time capsule of wild hope, almost painful to look back on now. "We really thought that man was gonna be the Black Messiah or something," she said. "What a time." "Yeah, turns out he was very much not," January said. "And white people ain't been okay since. Look at them.”

HopeOptimismAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesPresidentsBarack ObamaMemorabiliaKeepsakes
Book:The Wilderness
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“The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”

RaceHistoryAmerican HistoryAfrican AmericansRace RelationsBlacknessWhitesWhitenessStranger In The Village
Book:Notes of a Native Son
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“Typical white man behavior, Ms. Mori said. Have you ever noticed how a white man can learn a few words of some Asian language and we just eat it up? He could ask for a glass of water and we’d treat him like Einstein. Sonny smiled and wrote that down, too. You’ve been here longer than we have, Ms. Mori, he said with some admiration. Have you noticed that when we Asians speak English, it better be nearly perfect or someone’s going to make fun of our accent? It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been here, Ms. Mori said. White people will always think we’re foreigners. But isn’t there another side to that? I said, my words a little slurred from the cognac in my bloodstream. If we speak perfect English, then Americans trust us. It makes it easier for them to think we’re one of them.”

ImmigrantsForeignersRefugeesWhitesLanguagesAsiansAsian Americans
Book:The Sympathizer
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“But the statue attracted a middle-aged, brown-haired, overweight White guy. Clearly drunk, he climbed onto the tiny stage and started fondling Buddha before his laughing audience of drunk friends at a nearby table. I had learned a long time ago to tune out the antics of drunk White people doing things that could get a Black person arrested. Harmless White fun is Black lawlessness.”

RacismAfrican AmericansBlacksStatuesDrunkennessBuddhaWhitesBad BehaviorInappropriate Behavior
Book:How to Be an Antiracist
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“But this discontent was still latent in 1954. At that time both Negroes and whites accepted the well-established patterns of segregation as a matter of fact. Hardly anyone challenged the system. Montgomery was an easy-going town; it could even have been described as a peaceful town. But the peace was achieved at the cost of human servitude.”

RaceTensionAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationRace RelationsDiscontentAlabamaWhitesMontgomery
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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