Race Quotes

“He would just play around, enjoy life and laugh at the white folks up his sleeve. God! What an adventure! What a treat it would be to mingle with white people in places where as a youth he had never dared to enter. At last he felt like an American citizen.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“Others cannot be absorbed or accepted into Britishness without destabilising the colonial idea of civilisational superiority that Britain is born from. Therefore, while being commanded to integrate on the one hand, racialised people are deliberately excluded from the nation on the other.”
― Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia

“Individualising racism makes it almost impossible to discuss it as a system of power related to capitalism and colonialism. Instead, in the mainstream, racism is usually only acknowledged when it manifests in physical attacks or explicit verbal abuse. But racism is rarely acknowledged when it manifests in more regular ongoing violence such as intergenerational poverty, systematic exclusion from adequate healthcare and housing, and methodical exploitation of labour.”
― Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia

“We are all beautifully complex, and there’s nothing more American than struggling to fit all that complexity into boxes you did not create in the first place.”
― Caleb Gayle, We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power

“I suggest that those who live in the past don't want a confrontation with the present. I believe that white Americans welcome the present race violence and that under the surface reactions of horror and shock is very deep relief. Now white Americans are back in the familiar jungle. Now the confrontation is in terms they can understand and in accord with their prejudices. Now they can have a confrontation because they think they know the answer to violence, and the answer is force, and furthermore they welcome the use of force. Now they no longer have to talk or think about injustice, guilt, or the immorality of racism. Now it is simple: "Law and order must be upheld before we get around to anything else.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“The current American scene can be lamented for its violence, crime, and chaos. To me there is less violence today than there was in the period that saw lynchings, murder of labor organizers, mobster rule of the cities in the Prohibition period, the Memorial Day Massacre by Chicago's police in the late 1930's, and the sinister everyday violence of whites against blacks. We dare to talk about the violence of the ghetto riots, which mainly consist of an assault against property, when for these hundreds of years we have daily, hourly, visited upon the blacks a violence against human spirit, a degradation and denial reminiscent of Chinese torture. What makes it even worse is our inordinate hypocrisy in posing as protagonists of freedom, equality, and fraternity while denouncing totalitarian racist butchers. Phony self-righteousness makes us grotesque.

What many see as chaos and disorder today are to me the boiling over of the human spirit in a demand for direction and purpose to give meaning to life and carry us toward the goals of freedom, equality, economic security, opportunity, justice, and peace.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“My mother says that groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans will soon become extinct, that their members are all old and dying out, but when I look up this chapter online I see young white men--college age or even younger--in the photos. They all look to be the same type of white: blondish, sweaty, pink. White is a sickness that is passed on and on.”
― Laura van den Berg, State of Paradise

“There is no White DNA, Black DNA.
There is no Muslim DNA, Jewish DNA.
We're made of stuff of the stars,
why do you still rot in the jungle gutter!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“Blackness doesn’t make you less, but it does frame your life. When you walk into a room, so does race. Frankly, it shows up before you do. It colors every conversation, shapes how you’re viewed, determines whether you’re even heard. From the day you get here, Blackness hangs over everything, from comments about your hair (‘Can I touch it?’) to mentions that certain Black people are ‘smart’ (’cause it’s assumed we’re idiots). The message comes through loud and clear: You’re not one of us, you’re less.”
― Brittney Griner, Coming Home

“There are closed doors you are going to face. It is part of the human race. Just keep the faith.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Beyond the Closed Door: Unique Keys to Unlock Destinies

“I am, I hope, a sufficiently good historian to know that racial qualities are a myth, and that the whole notion of Race is an absurdity which becomes particularly fragrant when attempts are made to apply it”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“King insisted on an attitude to others he called Love, even when what he was doing was to make an extremely vigorous protest against unjust conditions. … it was not romantic love, and it did not even require us to like the people. … we treat people as people who will listen and think, and who ultimately may join with us in building something beautiful. Philosophy, as I shall practice it here, shares that project and that hope.”
― Martha C. Nussbaum, The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis

“Hawkins and the U.S. government knew that the concept of private property must take hold. They knew that communalism among the Creeks provided strength, but you can divide and conquer a nation more easily with private property if you pit family estate against family estate.”
― Caleb Gayle, We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power

“When we give people names that they did not give themselves, we erase the identity they and their ancestors fought for. The labels we give them come preloaded with definitions limited by our imaginations.”
― Caleb Gayle, We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power

“We let our simplistic misconceptions about race triumph rather than allow identities to be beautifully complex.”
― Caleb Gayle, We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power

“White people love their dogs. Kill a nigger and comb their hair at the same time. But I've seen grown white men cry about their dogs.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“After the defeat of the German Revolution in 1848 German Nationalism lost much of its original liberalism. Worship of State and Race began to predominate over the principle of Liberty, taken by the Germans from the French Revolution. The Austro-German bourgeoisie of Vienna and Bohemia turned its back on liberalism, and plunged into an orgy of intolerant romantic nationalism. Liberalism was left more and more to the Jews who, as a socially inferior group, were naturally more inclined to see the value of individual liberty and equality than the Germans, intoxicated since the victory of 1870 by a sense of the strength of the German people.”
― Hugh Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe Between the Wars: 1918-1941

“Quit bothering with angels, I say. They’re no good for Indians.
Remember what happened last time
some white god came floating across the ocean?”
― Natalie Díaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec

“White men get a choice. They get to choose they job, choose they house. They get to make black babies, then disappear into thin air, like they wasn't never there to begin with, like these black women they slept with or raped done laid on top of themselves and got pregnant. White men get to choose for black men too. Used to sell 'em; now they just send 'em to prison like they did my daddy, so that they can't be with they kids. Just about breaks my heart to see you, my son, my daddy's grandson, over here with these babies walking up and down Harlem who barely even know your name, let alone your face. Alls I can think is this ain't the way it's s posed to be. There are things you ain't learned from me, things you picked up from your father though you ain't know even him, things he picked up from white men. It makes me sad to see my you thinkin you can leave like your daddy did. You keep doin' what you doin' and the white man don't got to do it no more. He ain't got to sell you or put you in a coal mine to own you. He'll own you just as is, and he'll say you the one who did it. He'll say it's your fault.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“You was always so angry. Even as a child, you was angry. I used to see you lookin' at me like you was like to kill me, and I didn't know why. Took me a long time to figure out that you was born to a man who could choose his life, but you wouldn't never be able to choose yours and it seemed like you was born knowing that.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“From Atlanta! His home town. No wonder she had turned him down. Up here trying to get a thrill in the Black Belt but a thrill from observation instead of contact. Gee, but white folks were funny. They didn't want black folks' game and yet they were always frequenting Negro resorts.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“His mind was a kaleidoscope: Atlanta, sea-green eyes, slender figure, titian hair, frigid manner. "I never dance with niggers." Then he fell asleep about five o'clock and promptly dreamed of her. Dreamed of dancing with her, dining with her, motoring with her, sitting beside her on a golden throne while millions of manacled white slaves prostrated themselves before him. Then there was a nightmare of grim, gray men with shotguns, baying hounds, a heap of gasoline-soaked faggots and a screeching, fanatical mob.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“Why not go and see what there was to this? Why not be the first Negro to try it out? Sure, it was taking a chance, but think of getting white in three days! No more jim crow. No more insults. As a white man he could go anywhere, be anything he wanted to be, do most anything he wanted to do, be a free man at last...”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“My sociology teacher had once said that there were but three ways for the Negro to solve his problem in America," he gestured with his long slender fingers, "'To either get out, get white, or get along.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“White at last! Gone was the smooth brown complexion. Gone were the slightly full lips and Ethiopian nose. Gone was the nappy hair that he had straightened so meticulously ever since the kink-no-more lotions first wrenched Aframericans from the tyranny and torture of the comb. There would be no more expenditures for skin whiteners; no more discrimination; no more obstacles in his path. He was free! The world was his oyster and he had the open sesame of a pork-colored skin!”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“He was through with coons, he resolved, from now on. He glanced in a superior manner at the long line of black and brown folk on one side of the corridor, patiently awaiting treatment. He saw many persons whom he knew but none of them recognized him. It thrilled him to feel that he was now indistinguishable from nine-tenths of the people of the United States; one of the great majority. Ah, it was good not to be a Negro any longer!”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“Unaccountably he felt at home here among these black folk. Their jests, scraps of conversation and lusty laughter all seemed like heavenly music. Momentarily he felt a disposition to stay among them, to share again their troubles which they seemed always to bear with a lightness that was yet not indifference. But then, he suddenly realized with just a tiny trace of remorse that the past was forever gone. He must seek other pastures, other pursuits, other playmates, other loves. He was white now.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“He saw in his great discovery the solution to the most annoying problem in American life. Obviously, he reasoned, if there were no Negroes, there could be no Negro problem. Without a Negro problem, Americans could concentrate their attention on something constructive.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“Doc sez she's culled, an' she sez so, but she looks mighty white tuh me."

"Everything that looks white ain't white in this man's country," Foster replied.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“These people were in no mood to be trifled with. A lifetime of being Negroes in the United States had convinced them that there was great advantage in being white.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More