Race Relations Quotes

“She looked at Norman. “Are you really a slave?” she asked.

“I am.”

“And you’re colored,” she said.

Norman nodded.

“Who can tell?”

“Nobody,” Norman said.

“Then why do you stay colored?”

“Because of my mother. Because of my wife. Because I don’t want to be white. I don’t want to be one of them.”

Sammy looked at me. “That’s a pretty good answer.”

“I thought so,” I said.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Papa, why do we have to learn this?”

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Frankly, the racial-harmony shit put Pepper on edge. The majority of the film crew were hippie freaks, but Zippo and the director of photography and Angela, the lady who did the wardrobe and makeup, were black. The white people did what they were told.

This was America, melting pot and powder keg. Surely something was about to pop off. It kept not happening.

Pepper had never worked jobs with white people before. Pulling shit in Newark, then uptown in those days, that was the reality. It was not done. Occasionally he'd get asked to join a crew with a white wheelman or a bankroll and that was a sign to wait for the next gig. His current refusals were simple common sense. Pepper barely trusted Negro crooks--why extend the courtesy to some cracker motherfucker who'd fuck you over first chance? Sometimes black people fell over themselves trying to vouch for a white man who hadn't wronged them. Yet.”
― Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto

“Getting over. He'd always liked that expression. Crooks make a big score, grab that jackpot, and law-abiding black folks get over, find a way to outwit white people's rules. Stealing a little security or safety or success from a world that fought hard to keep that from you.”
― Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto

“Are we more concerned with the size, power, and wealth of our society or with creating a more just society? The failure to pursue justice is not only a moral default. Without it social tensions will grow and the turbulence in the streets will persist despite disapproval or repressive action. Even more, a withered sense of justice in an expanding society leads to corruption of the lives of all Americans. All too many of those who live in affluent America ignore those who exist in poor America; in doing so, the affluent Americans will eventually have to face themselves with the question that Eichmann chose to ignore: how responsible am I for the well-being of my fellows? To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“We started to laugh and then we spotted a white man up the road. There was nothing that irritated white men more than a couple of slaves laughing. I suspected they were afraid we were laughing at them or else they simply hated the idea of us having a good time.”
― Percival Everett, James

“There was a free nigger there from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane--the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? they said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ’lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself, if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin. Them's the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me--I'll never vote agin as long as I live.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free – and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.” That was so – I couldn’t get around that noway. That was where it pinched.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“There's a whole lot of things you don't know about niggers. And God forbid you should! There's a whole lot of things you don't know about white girls . . about yourself, Virginia. And God forbid you should! That's what we men are here for.”
― Waldo Frank, Holiday

“All the world's color: and I must hold my pride against the world. Pride is white. History is white. The Christ is white. Honor is white, and birthright. All else . . color.”
― Waldo Frank, Holiday

“Up, you mighty race, accomplish what you will.”
― Marcus Garvey

“You've driven one of these before."

"Yeah." One of these, nice way to put it. Oh, you've held a tennis racket before, oh, you've worn shoes before, oh, you've used a toothbrush before. Bug Eyes is a weisenheimer but he was right. The lady is white. That surprised condescension in the voice is an unmistakable characteristic of the Caucasian, a special characteristic of the female Caucasian. The funny thing is they don't even know they do it.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“If Abbie knew about this, she'd say that he'd let The Race down. She said colored people (sometimes she just said The Race) had to be cleaner, smarter, thriftier, more ambitious than white people, so that white people would like colored people. The way she explained it made him feel as though he were carrying The Race around with him all the time. It kept him confused, a little frightened, too. At that moment The Race sat astride his shoulders, a weight so great that his back bent under it.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Abbie kept telling him all the things he could, and could not, do because of The Race. You had to be polite; you had to be punctual; you couldn't wear bright-colored clothes, or loud-colored socks; and even certain food was forbidden. Abbie said that she loved watermelons, but she would just as soon cut off her right arm as go in a store and buy one, because colored people loved watermelons. She wouldn't buy porgies because colored people loved all the coarsefleshed fish and were particularly fond of porgies. She wouldn't fry fish, she wouldn't fry chicken, because everybody knew that colored people liked fried food. She was always on time, in fact, way ahead of time, because colored people were always late, you could never count on them, they had no sense of responsibility. The funny thing about it was that when Abbie talked about The Race she sounded as though she weren't colored, and yet she obviously was.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Objective about race? Hell, no. Nobody was. Not in the USA.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Powther, there is things about white people that I never will understand. And to tell you the God's honest truth, I don't intend to try. I am a hell of a lot more comfortable, and it gives me a lot more honest-to-God pleasure just to write 'em all down as bastards and leave 'em strictly alone. Live and let live is what I say. I don't bother them and they don't bother me, so we get along fine.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Well, of course," Camilo said, and grinned back at JohnRolandJoseph and his long line of bought and paid for ancestors, as friendly and unselfconscious as though all her life she had been looking for men, black men, big black men--plantation bucks (stud) look at his thighs, look at that back, look at his dingle-dangle--as though all her life she had been looking for colored men to whom she was not married, to whom she would never be married because she was already married to a nice young white man, as though all her life she had told uniformed monkeys who pulled elevators in rundown colored hotels, in Harlem, that she couldn't find, had lost, misplaced, a gentleman of color named Williams.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows

“Haiti was the stuff of American nightmare: a nation of black slaves who had killed off their white masters.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“white ways are
the way of death
come into the
Black
and live”
― Lucille Clifton, Good News About the Earth

“Hirohito tried to show no change in his face, but he was changing on the inside, where people change when they’re sad or angry.”
― Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

“We must question the lengths to which society will go to rationalize the official, clandestine, and extralegal weapons of violence used to eradicate populations labeled as undesirable.”
― Brittany Michelle Friedman, Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons

“Race + Love = War.
It's a complicated equation.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“The white people of the South are essentially a fine kindly breed, the same sort of human beings that one finds the world over.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“We have a collection of 800 jars of soil in our museum. We collect these soils from lynching sites. People who are involved in erecting markers collect the soil, put it in a jar that has the name of the victim, the date of the victim, and then they bring it back to the museum.

An older Black woman was digging soil at a site in west Alabama. She was afraid because it was on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. As she was about to dig, a big white man in a pickup truck drove by and stared at her. It made her anxious. Then he drove by again and stared some more. Then he parked his truck, got out, and walked toward her. She was terrified. Then the man asked, "What are you doing?" She was going to tell him that she was just getting dirt for her garden. Then she said, "Mr. Stevenson, something got ahold of me. I told that man, I'm digging soil here because this is where a Black man was lynched in 1937." She just looked down and started digging.

The man surprised her by asking, "Does that memo you have talk about the lynching?" She said, "It does." Then he asked, "Can I read it?" He started reading while she started digging. After he finished reading the memo, he said, "Would it be all right if I helped you?" She said, "Yes." The man got down on his knees, and she offered him the implement to dig the soil. He said, "No, no, no, no, no, you keep that. I'll just use my hands." She said he started picking up the soil and putting it in the jar, and throwing his hand into the soil. She said there was something about the conviction with which he was putting his whole body into this that moved her.

She went from fear to relief to joy so quickly she couldn't help it. Tears were running down her face. The man turned to her and he said, "Oh, ma'am, I'm so sorry I'm upsetting you." She said, "No, no, no. You're blessing me." They kept digging, and they were getting near to filling the jar. She looked over at the man, and she noticed that he had slowed down. His face had turned red. Then she saw that there was a tear running down his face. She reached over and put her hand on his shoulder. She said, "Are you all right?" That's when the man turned her, and he said, "No, ma'am." He said, "I'm just so worried that it might have been my grandfather who helped lynch this man."

She said they both sat on that roadside and wept. She said, I'm going to go back and put this jar of soil in the museum in Montgomery. Then the man said, "Ma'am, would it be all right if I just followed you back?" She said, "Sure." She called me on the way back. She said, "Mr. Stevenson, I want you to come to the museum and meet my new friend." I was there when these two people who met on a roadside in a place of pain and agony and violence and bigotry came in and together did something beautiful by putting that jar of soil in that exhibit.

I'm not naive. I don't believe that beautiful things like that always happen when we tell the truth. I do believe that we deny ourselves the beauty of justice when we refuse to tell the truth. I've seen too much beauty come out of truth-telling, too much restoration, too much redemption, to believe that truth-telling doesn't have a power that is greater than the fear and anger that is prompting these orders, prompting some of this retreat. I worry about people who are already surrendering and waving white flags, and running for cover. I just don't think that's the way we're going to get to the other side.”
― Bryan Stevenson

“I cain't believe Miss Watson gone sell you. I mean, she likes you."

"I reckon she likes money mo'. Mos' peoples likes money mo' 'n anythin' else. White folks, anyways.”
― Percival Everett, James

“You know dey gone think I da one dat kilt you."

"I never thought of that," Huck said. "I never dreamed I could git you into trouble. Why would you want to kill me?"

"Dat don't matter none to white folks."

"I don't like white folks," he said. "And I is one.”
― Percival Everett, James

“He was enjoying himself and that was all right with me. It always made life easier when white folks could laugh at a poor slave now and again.

"I had you goin'," Huck said.

I acted like he'd hurt my feelings. White people love feeling guilty.”
― Percival Everett, James

“White folks watch us work and forget how long we're left alone in our heads. Working and waiting."

I smiled. "If only they knew the danger in that.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Slaves didn't have the luxury of anger toward a white man, but I had felt anger.”
― Percival Everett, James

“The town looked like it might be called Bluebird. It was well populated with complacent-looking, nicely dressed white people, the scariest kind.”
― Percival Everett, James