Race Quotes

“I'd made it this far and refused to give up because all my life I had always finished the race.”
― Louis Zamperini, Devil at My Heels: A Heroic Olympian's Astonishing Story of Survival as a Japanese POW in World War II

“Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“Placing the burden on the individual to break down doors in finding better education for a child is attractive to conservatives because it reaffirms their faith in individual ambition and autonomy. But to ask an individual to break down doors that we have chained and bolted in advance of his arrival is unfair.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools

“That's the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. Parasites, criminals, dope fiends, dope peddlers, whores--when we can ride past them at Fayette and Monroe, car doors locked, our field of vision cautiously restricted to the road ahead, then the long journey into darkness is underway. Pale-skinned hillbillies and hard-faced yos, toothless white trash and gold-front gangsters--when we can glide on and feel only fear, we're well on the way. And if, after a time, we can glimpse the spectacle of the corner and manage nothing beyond loathing and contempt, then we've arrived at last at that naked place where a man finally sees the sense in stretching razor wire and building barracks and directing cattle cars into the compound.

It's a reckoning of another kind, perhaps, and one that becomes a possibility only through the arrogance and certainty that so easily accompanies a well-planned and well-tended life. We know ourselves, we believe in ourselves; from what we value most, we grant ourselves the illusion that it's not chance in circumstance, that opportunity itself isn't the defining issue. We want the high ground; we want our own worth to be acknowledged. Morality, intelligence, values--we want those things measured and counted. We want it to be about Us.

Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinkably assume that we would be consigned to places like Fayette Street fully equipped, with all the graces and disciplines, talents and training that we now posses. Our parents would still be our parents, our teachers still our teachers, our broker still our broker. Amid the stench of so much defeat and despair, we would kick fate in the teeth and claim our deserved victory. We would escape to live the life we were supposed to live, the life we are living now. We would be saved, and as it always is in matters of salvation, we know this as a matter of perfect, pristine faith.

Why? The truth is plain:

We were not born to be niggers.”
― David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood

“Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, national identity, any of a dozen minor and irrelevant markers. ~ Valentine”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes

“You either commit yourself as a professional racing driver that's designed to win races or you come second or you come third or fifth and am not design to come third, fourth or fifth, I race to win.”
― Ayrton Senna

“I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.”
― Audrey Lorde

“There is a belief advanced today, and in some cases by conservative black authors, that poor children and particularly black children should not be allowed to hear too much about these matters. If they learn how much less they are getting than rich children, we are told, this knowledge may induce them to regard themselves as "victims," and such "victim-thinking," it is argued, may then undermine their capacity to profit from whatever opportunities may actually exist. But this is a matter of psychology-or strategy-and not reality. The matter, in any case, is academic since most adolescents in the poorest neighborhoods learn very soon that they are getting less than children in the wealthier school districts. They see suburban schools on television and they see them when they travel for athletic competitions. It is a waste of time to worry whether we should tell them something they could tell to us. About injustice, most poor children in American cannot be fooled.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools

“Writing about race and crime was not new territory for me. But it can be treacherous. So here are my rules: No stereotypes. No generalizations. No explanations. No apologies. Just the facts, ma’am.”
― Colin Flaherty, White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Race Riots to America

“Besides, skin color was skin color, right? It was just the color of your goddamned skin. There was nothing anybody could do about that. You were born with it. Like some people were born with big feet or blue eyes. You didn't make the choice. Your parents did. Or God did.”
― Pete Hamill, Snow in August

“Race relations never improve in war time; they always worsen. And it is when the boys come home the Ku Klux Klans are organized. I believe with George Schuyler that the only really feasible way to improve the general situation of the American Negro is to convince more and more whites that he is, as men go in this world, a decent fellow, and that amicable living with him is not only possible but desirable. Every threat of mass political pressure, every appeal to political mountebanks, only alarms the white brother, and so postpones the day of reasonable justice.”
― H.L. Mencken

“We're this big melting pot, but someone turned up the heat too high, and the stew started to burn. Gangs, crime, fights, and fear are now a regular part of our local stew.”
― Neal Shusterman, Red Rider's Hood

“Is our blood not the same color? Do we not bleed the same or share each other's burdens? ... What makes you and I so different, Ayden?”
― Nadege Richards, Burning Bridges

“The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago.”
― Cornel West, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto

“If you're not at the front, you're not in the race.”
― David Millar, Racing Through the Dark

“Many suburban legislators representing affluent school districts use terms such as "sinkhole" when opposing funding for Chicago's children. "We can't keep throwing money," said Governor Thompson in 1988, "into a black hole." The Chicago Tribune notes that, when this phrase is used, people hasten to explain that it is not intended as a slur against the race of many of Chicago's children. "But race," says the Tribune, "never is far from the surface...”
― Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools

“Quite frankly we are both tired of the race we have been asked to run.”
― K. Howard Joslin, Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life

“People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work. That might be true in some cases, but in mine, as with many riders I knew, it was precisely the opposite. EPO granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you'd ever imagined, in both training and racing.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

“He had no racial feeling—not because he was superior to his brother civilians, but because he had matured in a different atmosphere, where the herd instinct does not flourish.”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“I advise you to be suspicious of any black American whose family does not claim a blood connection to Native Americans. That’s a clear sign of a racial infiltrator who has not done enough research.”
― Baratunde Thurston, How to Be Black

“As with outlaw figures, in diverse musical and oral cultures throughout the world- Mexican corridos and Egyptian shaabi music, for example- Hip Hop's irreverence toward dominant values and noncompliance with the status quo creates alternative, counterhegemonic spaces.”
― H. Sammy Alim and Geneva Smitherman

“That is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry and whippings and malnutrition and melancholy and suicide: death itself. For before the white men came to Guinea to strip-mine field hands. ... black people did not die ... the decedent ... took up residence in an afterworld that was in many ways indistinguishable from his former estate.”
― David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident

“As social phenomena, languages are tied up in world of unequal power relations, gaining or losing status not based on technical linguistic grounds but on social judgement, biases, and stereotypes that are based on the status of their speakers. As such, we argue that white America's love-hate relationship with black modes of communication can only be interpreted within a framework that considers language a primary site of cultural contestation. It should be clear by now that it's about more than a mothafucka, right? Our analysis of Black Language forms that the dominant culture considers inflammatory, controversial, or stigmatized allows us to make several observations. First, building off what anthropologist and linguist Arthur Spears noted in his discussion of uncensored speech, Black verbal culture, like all cultures is "a complex network of predispositions, values, behaviors, expectations and routines." Language practices, in their varying sociocultural contexts, can only be understood if read within the full range of the community's speech activities, and that requires rigorous ethnographic search and analysis. Second the community's beliefs and ideas about language- it's language ideologies- should be the primary point of departure for investigation and interpretation.”
― H. Sammy Alim and Geneva Smitherman

“At home they thought of white people as a vague but powerful entity--like the forces that control the weather, that capable of destruction, that hidden from view.”
― Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

“Death was constant, unprejudiced to age, race, or creed.”
― Jessica Fortunato, The Sin Collector: Thomas

“You should never let a word control you, intimidate you, or make you uncomfortable, and that applies to people of all races. Intent is where insult lies, and hate. Not in language.”
― Felix Clay

“racial”
― Baratunde Thurston, How to Be Black

“It was ridiculous really. I had just won a major race despite not being in top form, yet I was going to dope.”
― David Millar, Racing Through the Dark

“I didn't care about goals or expectations any more, I was just determined to race my heart out.”
― David Millar, Racing Through the Dark