Race Quotes

“In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“There are, and always have been, destructive pseudo-scientific notions linked to race and religion; these are the most widespread and damaging. Hopefully, educated people can succeed in shedding light into these areas of prejudice and ignorance, for as Voltaire once said: 'Men will commit atrocities as long as they believe absurdities.”
― Martin Gardner

“Relations were never good (how comfortable can you really be with a race that sees you as a nutritious part of a complete breakfast).”
― John Scalzi, Old Man's War

“Every student of political science, every student of political economy, every student of economics knows that the race can only be saved through a solid industrial foundation; that the race can only be saved through political independence. Take away industry from a race, take away political freedom from a race and you have a slave race.”
― Marcus Garvey, Selected Writings and Speeches of Marcus Garvey

“Good life is not a sprint. It’s an exerting marathon of purpose, passion, patience and perseverance. It’s the road where faith and hard work meet. It is an unusual love adventure between success and failure. It is where truth is a belt and integrity a shield. It is knowing your lane, staying on your lane and running your own race. It’s a road loathed and less traveled by most men.”
― Abiodun Fijabi

“Living with the daily ugliness of slum life, educational castration and economic exploitation, some ghetto dwellers now and then strike out in spasms of violence and self-defeating riots. A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. It is the desperate, suicidal cry of one who is so fed up with the powerlessness of his cave existence that he asserts that he would rather be dead than ignored.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“It’s bad bein’ strange niggers wid white folks. Everybody is aginst yuh.”

“Dat sho is de truth. De ones de white man know is nice colored folks. De ones he don’t know is bad niggers." Janie said this and laughed and Tea Cake laughed with her.

"Janie, Ah done watched it time and time again; each and every white man think he know all de GOOD darkies already. He don't need tuh know no mo'. So far as he's concerned, all dem he don't know oughta be tried and sentenced tuh six months behind the United States privy house at hard smellin'."

"How come de United States privy house, Tea Cake?"

"Well, you know Old Uncle Sam always do have de biggest and de best of everything.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“You have a very interesting look. Where are you from?'
Ugh. That's marginally better than the What are you? question I get sometimes, but still gross. 'New York,' I say pointedly. 'You?'
'I mean originally,' he clarifies, and that's it. I'm done.
'New York,' I repeat, and stand up from my stool.”
― Karen M. McManus, The Cousins

“I might have been just half an Asian, but in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren’t. Funnily enough, I had never felt inferior because of my race during my foreign student days. I was foreign by definition and therefore was treated as a guest. But now, even though I was a card-carrying American with a driver’s license, Social Security card, and resident alien permit, Violet still considered me as foreign, and this misrecognition punctured the smooth skin of my self-confidence. Was I just being paranoid, that all-American characteristic? Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“To be white in the Caribbean is to have money, power, and the freedom to do anything or nothing - it is, in many cases, to occupy the top rung of society.”
― Sharon Hurley Hall, Exploring Shadeism

“Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place. And she began thinking of Pop unable to get a job; of Jim slowly disintegrating because he, too, couldn’t get a job, and of the subsequent wreck of their marriage; of Bub left to his own devices after school. From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in and the wall had been built up brick by brick by eager white hands.”
― Ann Petry, The Street

“I was as much scared as angry, but where does a slave put anger? We could be angry with one another; we were human. But the real source of our rage had to go without address, swallowed, repressed.”
― Percival Everett, James

“All this because one race did not have the decency to be ashamed of dealing in human flesh.”
― Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

“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.”
― John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me

“But race in the United States is not a tidy matter. Only three of the submitted pieces explicitly referenced the future. Most of them were concerned with the past and the present. And that told me two things. First, it confirmed how inextricably interwoven the past is in the present, how heavily that past bears on the future; we cannot talk about black lives mattering or police brutality without reckoning with the very foundation of this country. We must acknowledge the plantation, must unfold white sheets, must recall the black diaspora to understand what is happening now. Second, it reveals a certain exhaustion, I think. We’re tired. We’re tired of having to figure out how to talk to our kids and teach them that America sees them as less, and that she just might kill them. This is the conversation we want to avoid. We’re tired of feeling futile in the face of this ever-present danger, this omnipotent history, predicated as this country is, founded as this country was, on our subjugation.”
― Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race

“The experience of slavery is the bedrock on which Caribbean society has been founded.”
― Sharon Hurley Hall, Exploring Shadeism

“In reality, I was a lanky, black, obvious teenager, obviously effeminate too, if given an opportunity to move or speak. But from a distance, maybe my body transformed, as the bodies of young black men are wont to do when stared at by white people in this country. Maybe my spine stretched itself into a basketball player’s posture, this stranger’s gaze giving me something I could never quite seem to give myself: the sense of being a real man, strong, even intimidating.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door. The GI Bill fixed things pretty good for the white boys he served with, but the uniform meant different things depending who wore it. What was the point of a no-interest loan when a white bank won't let you step inside?”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“It is as if we have reentered the past and are living in a second Nadir: It seems the rate of police killings now surpasses the rate of lynchings during the worst decades of the Jim Crow era. There was a lynching every four days in the early decades of the twentieth century. It’s been estimated that an African American is now killed by police every two to three days.”
― Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race

“Life is a race against time”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Your race is your diminishing life”
― Sunday Adelaja

“I didn't want to be the kind of privileged person who tells oppressed people what their version of diversity should look like.”
― Kevin A. Patterson, Love's Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities

“There was something lacking in these ofay places of amusement or else there was something present that one didn’t find in the black-and-tan resorts in Harlem. The joy and abandon here was obviously forced. Patrons went to extremes to show each other they were having a wonderful time. It was all so strained and quite unlike anything to which he had been accustomed. The Negroes, it seemed to him, were much gayer, enjoyed themselves more deeply and yet they were more restrained, actually more refined. Even their dancing was different. They followed the rhythm accurately, effortlessly and with easy grace; these lumbering couples, out of step half the time and working as strenuously as stevedores emptying the bowels of a freighter, were noisy, awkward, inelegant. At their best they were gymnastic where the Negroes were sensuous.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anticapitalist policies. Anticapitalism cannot eliminate class racism without antiracism.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“A consociational democracy exists when the class interests of the ruling elite in preserving a unitary multi-ethnic state prevail over countervailing interests to break the state down into ethnic components. The consociational democracy is a special case of bourgeois democracy, a state run by a capitalist technocratic, bureaucratic elite supposedly representative institutions elected officials and other paraphenalia of parliamentarism. In a plural society however, where primordial attachments to ethnic collectivities compete with class affiliation, the illusion of democracy can only be maintained if the elite itself is multi-ethnic and in proportion approximating those of constituent ethnes in the general population. If that condition is not met, then the political system is perceived by the under-represented group as undemocratic, dominated by the over-represented group or groups. Proportionality at the elite level is thus a key feature of consociational democracies, for it is true proportionality that preserve the democratic fiction of representativeness and thus its own legitimacy. If one accepts the principle of ethnic representation, then the ethnicity of a member of the ruling class contains a validation of the right to rule. An essential corollary of the ethnic proportionality of such systems is the muting of class conflicts to the extent that ethnic sentiments are politicized, class consciousness is lowered. If the main line of cleavage in a society is ethnicity or some feature of it like religion or language. If the political game is seen primarily as an ethnic balancing act and the allocation of scarce resources, if there are no glaring disparities in ethnic representation at various class levels, it follows that the significance of class cleavages within each ethne is correspondingly decreased. Under such circumstances, the class interests of the multi-ethnic elite are best served by a system. The more politicized ethnicity becomes, the ethnicized the polity, the more attention is deflected from class conflicts and re-directed.”
― Pierre Van Den Berghe

“Pathological people made the pathological ghetto, segregationists say. The pathological ghetto made pathological people, assimilationists say. To be antiracist is to say the political and economic conditions, not the people, in poor Black neighborhoods are pathological. Pathological conditions are making the residents sicker and poorer while they strive to survive and thrive, while they invent and reinvent cultures and behaviors that may be different but never inferior to those of residents in richer neighborhoods. But if the elite race-classes are judging the poor race-classes by their own cultural and behavioral norms, then the poor race-classes appear inferior. Whoever creates the norm creates the hierarchy and positions their own race-class at the top of the hierarchy.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Because you are Black and lesbian, you seem to speak with the moral authority of suffering.' Yes, I am Black and lesbian, and what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority. There is a difference.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“People in Africa actually sold each other before the triangular slave trade began, so although I think slavery glorifies dehumanization, I wanted to show that there was no racism in slavery. It's not very probable for one race to be racist against its own race of people, or for the Africans to enslave other Africans out of racism against other AFRICANS! Rather, the only racism behind slavery was the INTERPRETATION and the EXPLOITATION of it. Originally, slavery was about commercialism and power, not about race, since Africans sold other Africans, but whatever people did with racial supremacy and the suppression of Native Americans and Africans was what actually could have been the strongest cause of the racism that used slavery as a cushion of support. Slavery isn’t racist. Rather, it could be used to support racism.”
― Lucy Carter, The Reformation

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste, what a senseless waste! But what of those things which you actually didn't like, not because you were not supposed to like them, not because to dislike them was considered a mark of refinement and education—but because you actually found them distasteful? The very idea annoyed me. How could you know? It involved a problem of choice. I would have to weigh many things carefully before deciding and there would be some things that would cause quite a bit of trouble, simply because I had never formed a personal attitude toward so much. I had accepted attitudes and it had made life seem simple...”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“White ain't a people. White is a spell they put on themselves. Losing they minds in it too much is probably what killed 'em. So there can't be a white colony, because white ain't an idea no more.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants