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Racism Quotes

To all you sensitive sallys out there who spend your time scribing angry letters, I have great news:...

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Picture of Sarah Silverman
Sarah SilvermanThe Bedwetter: Stories of Courage

The Indian temperament is so excitable, you know.

Picture of Saul Bellow
Saul BellowMr. Sammler's Planet

Despite what some people have said, President Bush did not want black people to die in New Orleans. ...

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Picture of Scott McClellan
Scott McClellanWhat Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception

Right now I'm thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery, another was eman...

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Marie felt a sudden urge to smash the glass, break down the door, pull down the building. She wanted...

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They called me an Indian pig. Oh, and they called me a prairie n*****. Pretty colorful, enit?""I sup...

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If you kill a black man, the world is silent. You can hear a garage door opening from twenty blocks ...

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I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to b...

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Picture of Sherman Alexie
Sherman AlexieYou Don't Have to Say You Love Me

Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated, that it is invisible because...

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We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. ...

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Sadly, racial, ethnic, and cultural hatred and intolerance are not just history, they are current ev...

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Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States...

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Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting again...

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White liberals are always saying, "What can we do?” I mean, they’re always coming to help black peop...

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Stokely CarmichaelStokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting alone was the big aim, but af...

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As I squatted on the grass at the edge of the woods, the pee felt hot between my legs. I watched in ...

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Picture of Sue Monk Kidd
Sue Monk KiddThe Secret Life of Bees

You know how many there are. You can't convince them and you can't kill 'em. You can only do your be...

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But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybo...

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Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, th...

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It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

And yet it had come to this: a cult that followed a dogmatic hard line of exclusion and repression, ...

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Picture of Terry Brooks
Terry BrooksBearers of the Black Staff

Looking out the window, Moist saw a small swarm of goblins leave the train and at first he thought, ...

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Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism ...

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We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one ...

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It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to oper...

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Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now...

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External explanations of black-white differences — discrimination or poverty, for example—seem to ma...

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Picture of Thomas Sowell
Thomas SowellBlack Rednecks and White Liberals

Nobody loves the head of a dandelion. Maybe because they are so many, strong, and soon.

That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, o...

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The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work....

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I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I n...

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In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who ea...

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Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed," she said, "and broke my heartstrings too. There...

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Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigabl...

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Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty....A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of t...

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Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side. You can say that you don’t pick sides, but event...

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In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as...

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Picture of Trevor Noah
Trevor NoahBorn a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look...

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Picture of Trevor Noah
Trevor NoahBorn a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

I think the argument that no whites are free of racism is quite erroneous. But then, on another leve...

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This so called 'Home of the Brave'why isn't anybody Backing us up!When they c these crooked ass Redn...

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The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more ev...

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The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place ...

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At the same time there was the good of the poor and the good of the rich. And the good of the whites...

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It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as [inherently] exceptional, whateve...

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It is not improbable that in hot countries, monkeys may have enslaved girls.

One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and...

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Picture of W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du BoisBlack Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole cause of their social c...

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The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the s...

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Picture of W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du BoisThe Souls of Black Folk

Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all c...

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They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come...

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Picture of W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du BoisThe Souls of Black Folk

Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the mo...

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It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color...

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Picture of Walter Mosley
Walter MosleyAll I Did Was Shoot My Man

From other stories that have been handed down to me I know that my people, like many others in the s...

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No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are...

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If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would r...

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My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a...

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Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose...

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It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the Moon as to put a bone in your nose.

He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Mos...

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I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, bla...

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Picture of William Faulkner
William FaulknerThe Sound and the Fury

They'd run all these tests on him and decided he wasn't racist. He wasn't, either, but not because h...

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No, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Picture of Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale HurstonHow It Feels To Be Colored Me

Beneath the armor of skin/and/bone/and/mindmost of our colors are amazingly the same.

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AberjhaniElemental: The Power of Illuminated Love

The issue, perhaps, boils down to one of how perceptions or misperceptions of racial difference impa...

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AberjhaniIlluminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.

Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.

A
AberjhaniIlluminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.

Millions of tears have fallen for black sons, brothers, lovers, and friends whose assailants took or...

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AberjhaniIlluminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.

Quote words that affirmall men and women are yourbrothers and sisters.

As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all...

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Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that...

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We cannot reform institutional racism or systemic policies if we are not actively engaged. It's not ...

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As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and in...

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Bigotry against any group should be disqualifying for high office.

Conquest occurred through violence, and over-expolitation and oppression necessitate continued viole...

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Picture of Albert Memmi
Albert MemmiThe Colonizer and the Colonized

Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dis...

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I later heard somewhere, or read, that Malcolm X telephoned an apology to the reporter. But this was...

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Picture of Alex Haley
Alex HaleyThe Autobiography of Malcolm X

Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain cl...

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I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and abi...

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While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumptio...

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Picture of Alexander von Humboldt
Alexander von HumboldtCosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe: Part One

The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mex...

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A whole nation cannot rise above itself.

I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.

Picture of Alice Walker
Alice WalkerIn Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-lo...

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In both cases, it is the prejudice, not the condition, that does the harm. It may be, as some would ...

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Picture of Andrew Tobias
Andrew TobiasThe Best Little Boy in the World

It’s often said that those who are unduly bothered by gays are latent homosexuals. Isn’t it possible...

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Picture of Ann Coulter
Ann CoulterMugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama

I love analogies! Let’s have one.Imagine that you dearly love, absolutely crave, a particular kind o...

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When you grow up knowing that you deserve to be on top, that the lesser houses exist to serve your h...

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Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and we've all been heavily sedated f...

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Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of ...

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Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource prid...

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To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or an...

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It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its destructive tol...

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Picture of Ashley Montagu
Ashley MontaguThe Dehumanization Of Man

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of ...

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For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily bea...

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It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate th...

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If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women...

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Picture of Audre Lorde
Audre LordeSister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat hi...

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Raising Black children — female and male — in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is peri...

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Picture of Audre Lorde
Audre LordeSister Outsider: Essays and Speeches