c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe.
— Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
['non-white' gay men] are run over at the intersection of racism and homophobia
— Eric C. Wat, The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles
And yet it had come to this: a cult that followed a dogmatic hard line of exclusion and repression, believed its teachings alone were the way that others must follow, and claimed special knowledge of something that had happened more than five centuries ago. It did nothing to soften its rigid stance, nothing to heal wounds that it had helped to create by deliberately shunning people of other Races, and nothing to explore the possibility of other beliefs. It held its ground even in the face of hard evidence that perhaps it had misjudged and refused to consider that it was courting a danger that might destroy everyone. p96
— Terry Brooks, Bearers of the Black Staff
So, I have to know," he says, "what are you?"But just because he has to know doesn't mean I have to tell him anything.
— Marilyn Hilton, Full Cicada Moon
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.
— Christopher Hitchens
You can't have capitalism without racism.
— Malcolm X
But now what? Why, now comes my master, takes me right away from my work, and my friends, and all I like, and grinds me down into the very dirt! And why? Because, he says, I forgot who I was; he says, to teach me that I am only a nigger! After all, and last of all, he comes between me and my wife, and says I shall give her up, and live with another woman. And all this your laws give him power to do, in spite of God or man. Mr. Wilson, look at it! There isn't one of all these things, that have broken the hearts of my mother and my sister, and my wife and myself, but your laws allow, and give every man power to do, in Kentucky, and none can say to him nay! Do you call these the laws of my country? Sir, I haven't any country, anymore than I have any father. But I'm going to have one. I don't want anything of your country, except to be let alone,--to go peaceably out of it; and when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey. But if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I'll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me!
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
If God wanted humans to play chess, he would have made us black or white.
— Zenna Henderson
And in "Elbow Room" the cast sings the glories of westward expansion in the United States, which involved the murder of native peoples and the violent conquest of half of Mexico. Among the lines in the song is one that intones, "There were plenty of fights / To win land right / But the West was meant to be / It was our Manifest Destiny?" Let it suffice to say that happily belting out a tune in which one merrily praises genocide is always easier for those whose ancestors weren't on the receiving end of the deal.
— Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
As I squatted on the grass at the edge of the woods, the pee felt hot between my legs. I watched in puddle in the dirt, the smell of it rising into the night. There was no difference between my piss and June's. That's what i thought when I looked at the dark circle on the ground. Piss is Piss.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.
— George Orwell
The thing about the black market is, it’s racist. White children make useful slaves, too.
— M.C. Humphreys
A stereotype is not a stereotype if it's true.
— Ron DeLegge II, Gents with No Cents
Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for justice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of modern mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become. This perplexing consequence came fully to light as soon as equality was no longer seen in terms of an omnipotent being like God or an unavoidable common destiny like death. Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact in itself, without any gauge by which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hundred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of every individual, who is “normal” if he is like everybody else and “abnormal” if he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become all the more conspicuous.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Yet it is true—skin can mean a great deal. Mine means that any man may strike me in a public place and never fear the consequences. It means that my friends do not always like to be seen with me in the street. It means that no matter how many books I read, or languages I master, I will never be anything but a curiosity—like a talking pig or a mathematical horse.
— Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.
— Ice-T
I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.
— Charles Darwin
It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record - and its potential damage to the quality of human life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the 'Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.' Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization.
— Ashley Montagu, The Dehumanization Of Man
I felt sick with hatred then for my own people. If you had asked me why I hated them, I might have said that I hated them for being so loud and for being so drunk. But now I believe I hated them for suddenly being my people, not just other people. In the United States, it is very easy for me to forget that the people around me are my people. It is easy, with all our divisions, to think of myself as an outsider in my own country. I have been taught, and I have learned well, I realize now, to think of myself as distinctly different from other white folks - more educated, more articulate, less crude. But in Mexico these distinctions became as meaningless to me as they should have always been.
— Eula Biss, Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
He began to talk about the fact that race was not only a construct but a scientific error along the magnitude of the error that the world was flat. . . 'And when they discover their mistake, I mean, truly discover it, it'll be as big as when they learned the world was, in fact, round. It'll open up a whole new world. And nothing will ever be the same.
— Danzy Senna, Caucasia
It’s not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys, it’s homophobia. It’s not the color of their skin that makes life harder for people of color; it’s racism. It’s not having vaginas that makes life harder for women, it’s sexism. And it’s ageism, far more than the passage of time, that makes growing older harder for all of us.
— Ashton Applewhite, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism
Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. "Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There's a fackin' q
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
You and I both know, deep in your heart, you agree with me. And I will prove it with one hypothetical scenario: you are alone in a closet of your home. There`s a bright red button. You can push that button and presto all Negroes and Jews and all other colored people are instantly removed from the North American continent and returned to their native countries.You`d push it, wouldn`t you whitey?See? See? See? in the final analysis, you agree with me.But of course, you wouldn`t do antything to bring that scenario about, or any other scenario favorable to your Race.
— Frazier Glenn Miller, A White Man Speaks Out
Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.
— Salman Rushdie
You can only rule over a subject race, especially when you are in a small minority, if you honestly believe yourself to be racially superior, and it helps towards this if you can believe that the subject race is biologically different.
— George Orwell
The other thing you can do is write a strong personal essay which lets admissions people inside your life, your heart, and your world....Anyway, it can be hard to figure out what to write about, so here are a few suggestions:...5. Reasons it's wrong to be racist even though it makes sense to you.
— Eugene Mirman, The Will to Whatevs: A Guide to Modern Life
It's very difficult not to come across as a white supremacist when there are so many black inferiorists around.
— David Bullard
All right, Schwartz, tackle my mind now. Go as deep as you want. I was born on Baronn in the Sirius Sector. I lived my life in an atmosphere of anti-Terrestrialism in the formative years, so I can't help what flaws and follies lie at the roots of my subconscious. But look on the surface and tell me if, in my adult years, I have not fought bigotry in myself. Not in others; that would be easy. But in myself, and as hard as I could.
— Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky
By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew—and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control it. I like to think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away. I like to think this, but I can’t promise it. The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines. But far beyond the boundaries within which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
He seemed to hasten the retreat of departing light by his very presence; the setting sun dipped sharply, as though fleeing before our nigger; a black mist emanated from him; a subtle and dismal influence; a something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil. The circle broke up. The joy of laughter died on stiffened lips.
— Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus
She didn't tell him white folks couldn't love the same as coloreds. She couldn't love the same neither though, cuz more than half of her was white.
— Shannon Celebi, Papa Was A Gypsy
The Indian temperament is so excitable, you know.
— Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet
... Mr Jellyband was indeed a typical rural John Bull of those days --- the days when our prejudiced insularity was at its height, when to an Englishman, be he lord, yeoman, or peasant, the whole of the continent of Europe was a den of immorality and the rest of the world an unexploited land of savages and cannibals.
— Emmuska Orczy
If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today - even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement - invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death.
— Frank B. Wilderson III
No matter how much Steve and I preached about staying legal, most of these men never believed us, and some would grin or wink as we spoke.They thought the CKKKK was like the Klan group their grandfathers belonged to back in the 1920's or 30's, when members could get by with just about anything.That ignorance about the CKKKK extended to the masses of people as well.I received hundreds of phone calls from people wanting me to go out and assault this or that person, for wrongs perceived by the callers.One 65 year old White man called, and after informing me his wife of 67 had left him and moved in with a younger man, demanded that I get some men together and, as the caller put it, "Go Klux 'em," meaning to commit some violent act upon them.A Black girl from Angier called once, saying her boyfriend was dating a White girl, and asked me, "Whut you gone do bout it?"Another elderly White lady called and said that her Black maid was stealing her jewelry, as if that was a classic crime for which the CKKKK should render traditional and just "Klan punishment."It's really incredible. 
— Frazier Glenn Miller, A White Man Speaks Out
In 1924 Mao took a Chinese friend, newly arrived from Europe, to see the notorious sign in the Shanghai park, 'Chinese and Dogs Not Allowed'.
— Paul Johnson, Modern Times
I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist.
— Jack London
We are not past racism. It took us 500 and however many years to get us where we are; it's not gonna change in one day or in one election. We made a step maybe, which they'll try and take away from us as soon as they can. But I mean what the fuck is the Tea Party about? It's not about "tea"; it ain't about "trans", either.
— Bo Brown
Some lurid things have been said about me—that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth—that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I'd only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been true when I was still on the correct side, and that such shocking deformities didn't seem to count for so much then. Arguing with the Stalinist mentality for more than three decades now, and doing a bit of soapboxing and street-corner speaking on and off, has meant that it takes quite a lot to hurt my tender feelings, or bruise my milk-white skin.
— Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
You are not special. You're just fucking not. You're a bland, boring motherfucker just like everybody else. You ever been to the mall and just looked in the eyes of the fellow travelers and seen how dull and lifeless their eyes are? Yours look like that too. You know why? 'Cause you're just as bland, you're just as fucking boring, there's nothing special about you. And trying to piggyback on the accomplishments of your race, or like, any fucking larger group really, is pathetic. You have to stand on individual merit and you just can't accept the fact that you suck. It's alright! I suck, Weber sucks, everyone sucks! We're all fucking shit, we suck dick, we're lame as fuck. And that's okay. That's fine.
— T.J. Kirk
The precise ancestry of a black drug dealer or cop killer is irrelevant. His blackness predicts and explains his crime. He reinforces the racist presumption. It is only when that presumption is questioned that a fine analysis of ancestry is invoked. Frederick Douglass was an ordinary nigger while working the fields. But as a famed abolitionist, it was often said that his genius must derive from his white half.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
And you know who's especially stupid? People who look at how unexceptional and bland and boring they are and say, "You know how I can remedy this? I will take solace in the accomplishments of my entire race. That way, I can draw attention away from the fact that I personally have not accomplished shit!
— T.J. Kirk
Ed Lim’s daughter, Monique, was a junior now, but as she’d grown up, he and his wife had noted with dismay that there were no dolls that looked like her. At ten, Monique had begun poring over a mail-order doll catalog as if it were a book–expensive dolls, with n ames and stories and historical outfits, absurdly detailed and even more absurdly expensive.‘Jenny Cohen has this one,’ she’d told them, her finger tracing the outline of a blond doll that did indeed resemble Jenny Cohen: sweet faced with heavy bangs, slightly stocky. 'And they just made a new one with red hair. Her mom’s getting it for her sister Sarah for Hannukkah.’ Sarah Cohen had flaming red hair, the color of a penny in the summer sun. But there was no doll with black hair, let alone a face that looked anything like Monique’s. Ed Lim had gone to four different toy stores searching for a Chinese doll; he would have bought it for his daughter, whatever the price, but no such thing ex
— Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere
There are no superior or inferior races. No one is intrinsically inferior or superior. All have the same value as creatures of god. Those who put others down simply want to exploit them.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom
To those supremacist racists I ask what color will be their bodies when they turn to dust.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom
Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and criticize others who have to fight for the things you take for granted.
— DaShanne Stokes
As fantastical as America’s space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.
— Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism--in order to believe themselves to be nonracist.
— Sherman Alexie, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
White privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, an absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost.
— Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race
Racism doesn’t care about respectability, wealth, education, or status
— Roxane Gay
Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.
— Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
I like being present in spaces where I am not welcome because you do not deserve to feel comfortable just because you're racist or sexist or small-minded.
— Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
To be born into, to go to school, to study, to learn, to play, to worship, to love, to work and to die in segregation and not have one single person who loved, mentored or guided me convey that there was any loss.
— Robin DiAngelo
Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side. You can say that you don’t pick sides, but eventually life will force you to pick a side.
— Trevor Noah
Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent.
— Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race
They told me there was very little racial prejudice in Hawaii. Like a woman is just a little bit pregnant.
— Dick Gregory, Nigger
It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the Moon as to put a bone in your nose.
— William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism
Issues can only be resolved if each person accepts accountability in the problem.
— Carlos Wallace, Life Is Not Complicated-You Are: Turning Your Biggest Disappointments Into Your Greatest Blessings
There's "good" in all things. You just have to find it.
— Carlos Wallace
It's not the fact that some people disagree with the protests. That is as much a right as the protests themselves. It is the hateful, profane, condescending way some have expressed their discontent that baffles me. How do you criticize actions you've deemed disrespectful and divisive and an affront to civilized behavior with rhetoric to the same end? That's like the devil judging the Grim Reaper for harvesting souls.
— Carlos Wallace
African-Amendment.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
There are white people who know how to act politely to blacks, but deep down you know they're uncomfortable. They're worse, more dangerous than those who speak their minds, because they don't know what they're capable of.
— Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban
For many years in Cuba, nobody spoke of the problem between blacks and whites. It was considered too disagreeable to discuss. But my father spoke to me clearly so that I would understand what happened to his father and his uncles during the Little War of 1912, so that I would know how our men were hunted down day and night like animals, and finally hung by their genitals from the lampposts in Guáimaro. The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books. Why, then, should I trust anything I read? I trust only what I see, what I know with my heart, nothing more.
— Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban
One strain of African American thought holds that it is a violent black recklessness—the black gangster, the black rioter—that strikes the ultimate terror in white America. Perhaps it does, in the most individual sense. But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract—The Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Hilly raises her voice about three octaves higher when she talks to coloured people. Elizabeth smiles like she's talking to a child, although certainly not her own. I am starting to notice things.
— Kathryn Stockett, The Help
It speaks volumes when people who are discriminated against go on to discriminate against others.
— DaShanne Stokes
Racism is a big problemCreated by small minds
— Gil Gonzales
WHITE NATIONALISTS & BLACK LIVES MATTER: The harder you swing the pendulum one way, the more violently it will swing back.
— A.E. Samaan
Discrimination is not just racial now. It’s also about the kind of body parts you have.
— Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste
Standing against discrimination for some while supporting discrimination against others hurts us all.
— DaShanne Stokes
I don't like the way our community throws the word around like it's water, because it's a derogatory term. A lot of times people come up to me and say, "What's up my nigger?" I'll respond, "Nah, wait a minute. What?" "Oh, oh, what's up my brother?" Sometimes you have to check people, because if it gets loose with us then white people will start to use it. I know a bunch of white people that started to get lax so I had to check them. Some black people were afraid to check them because they thought it was cool. You can never turn that word around and make it cool Nigger is just derogatory, it's wrong, and it's a fucked up term. It's not a word of love, Yo, what's up my nigger?" Fuck that. You can't turn the word puss around. Go around and say, "What's up pussy" to a brother. He'll try to kill you. "What's up dickhead?" You can't turn that around, so you can't turn nigger around as hard as you try.
— Chuck D, Lyrics of a Rap Revolutionary, Vol. 1
Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Marton interacted, thus transforming a seventeen-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim.
— Jesmyn Ward, Carol Anderson
The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes— I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether— is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
When you grow up knowing that you deserve to be on top, that the lesser houses exist to serve your house’s glorious destiny, you take such things for granted. You’re born assuming that someone else is paying the cost of your life. It’s just the way things are. What happens during annexation—it’s a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.
— Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice
If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them?
— Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace
In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.
— Angela Y. Davis
...[E]xcept the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an intermitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period. Upon the slightest and most unreasonable pretences, as well as upon accusations the most absurd and groundless, their persons and property were exposed to every turn of popular fury... Yet the passive courage inspired by the love of gain induced the Jews to dare the various evils to which they were subjected, in consideration of the immense profits which they were enabled to realise in a country naturally so wealthy as England. In spite of every kind of discouragement, and even of the special court of taxations already mentioned, called the Jews' Exchequer, erected for the very purpose of despoiling and distressing them, the Jews increased, multiplied, and accumulated huge sums, which they transferred from one hand to another by means of bills of exchange-an invention for which commerce is said to be indebted to them, and which enabled them to transfer their wealth from land to land, that, when threatened with oppression in one country, their treasure might be secured in another. The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which they were visited...
— Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
An elevator doesn’t exist without its freight. If there’s no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence. The elevator and the passenger need each other.
— Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
It’s got fuck all to do with being racist. I don’t care if he’s purple or orange or fucking yellow with pink spots! Although if he’s yellow with pink spots perhaps we should call a first aider. All I care about is his CSCS card and this Home Office card that is now in my possession
— Karl Wiggins, Dogshit Saved My Life
Vagrancy laws and other laws defining activities such as "mischief" and "insulting gestures" as crimes were enforced vigorously against blacks. The aggressive enforcement of these criminal offenses opened up an enormous market for convict leasing.
— Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
The Left would like to believe that racism—not the breakdown of marriage and family, the absence of religious norms, a degraded popular culture, and other issues that all concern values—is the primary impediment to black progress in America. Therefore the Left declares racism the greatest impediment to black progress.
— Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph
Political correctness' as 'over-sensitivity' is code for saying the privileged shouldn't have their unearned privileges questioned.
— DaShanne Stokes
Saying something is 'politically correct' is often a way of dismissing the voices of the oppressed.
— DaShanne Stokes
Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of world economy, is so far advanced that racial purity can have meaning only to a numbskull.
— Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.
— Trevor Noah, Born 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 back I realize she raised me like a white kid - not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
The betrayal I now felt was greater because it had been perpetrated with the greatest of charm and courtesy.
— E.R. Braithwaite, To Sir, With Love
It was like a disease, and these children whom I loved without caring about their skins or their backgrounds, they were tainted with the hateful virus which attacked their vision, distorting everything that was not white or English.
— E.R. Braithwaite, To Sir, With Love
When someone calls you a 'nigger', then you feel sorry for him... You have to pity him because his mind has such a sorry way of expressing itself.
— Adam Makos, Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice
...[W]e must admit that... law must be valid, not merely for men, but for all rational creatures generally, not merely under certain contingent conditions or with exceptions, but with absolute necessity...
— Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
But why do we say nothing?" Ujunwa asked. She raised her voice and looked at the others. "Why do we always say nothing?
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck
I still worry about Africa, we are slaves to western and Eastern Brands and we do not cherish and love our own. We are not even in charge of our economies because we depend heavily on what happens in the East or West, Worse-off we still judge each other based on skin color because those from Northern Africa and even some in East Africa believe that they are not Africans and they do not integrate with the darker Africans. For centuries we are still being victimized by other races from other continents, because they despise our dark skin and think that we are lesser than them..Xenophobia still lingers and some have the cold heart to kill their black African brothers and sisters and yet the people who owe them reparation and economic freedom are originally from the western countries. We still are held captive by our governments , who abuse our resources only to feed their pockets at the expense our crumbling nations. Why should we continue to suffer when we can apply Pan Africanism and Rise above the Western and Eastern Countries, but sadly we do not because we are not united.. Africa must unite to solve its problems,Happy Africa Day
— Tare Munzara
Racism itself is black. It's OWL. It's everywhere.It's Our Whole Life
— Bhavik Sarkhedi
In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven't lynched somebody then you can't be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters. They are people with loving families, regular folk who pay taxes. Somebody needs to get the job of deciding who is racist and who isn't. Or maybe it's time to just scrap the word 'racist.' Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it?
— Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
You’re tired of hearing about racism? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it.” ~ Jon Stewart
— Chris Smith
We'd never talked about it, but I figured you knew the rules. If a cop stopped, you didn't run, you didn't talk back, you didn't ever, ever get angry. White people could do that—hell, they could shoot up a church and then ask for Burger King—but not us. We got killed at traffic stops for speeding, for having broken taillights, for knowing our rights.
— Una LaMarche, You in Five Acts
There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when there's a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler's head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror.
— Chris L. Hayes
What sorts of people dig up a black grandparent and then demand special privileges? What does it mean when these same people spew racist abuse at the rest of their ancestry? What does it signify when a society rewards them for this type of behavior?
— Daniel Greenfield
When I was twelve, my parents had two talks with me.One was the usual birds and bees. Well, I didn't really get the usual version. My mom, Lisa, is a registered nurse, and she told me what went where, and what didn't need to go here, there, or any damn where till I'm grown. Back then, I doubted anything was going anywhere anyway. While all the other girls sprouted breasts between sixth and seventh grade, my chest was as flat as my back.The other talk was about what to do if a cop stopped me.Momma fussed and told Daddy I was too young for that. He argued that I wasn't too young to get arrested or shot."Starr-Starr, you do whatever they tell you to do," he said. "Keep your hands visible. Don't make any sudden moves. Only speak when they speak to you."I knew it must've been serious. Daddy has the biggest mouth of anybody I know, and if he said to be quiet, I needed to be quiet.I hope somebody had the talk with Khalil.
— Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
White liberals are always saying, "What can we do?” I mean, they’re always coming to help black people. I thought of an analogy. If you were walking down the street and a man had a gun on another man – let’s say both of them were white – and you had to help somebody, whom would you help? It’s obvious to me that if I were walking down the street, and a man had a gun on another man, and I was going to help, I’d help the man who didn’t have the gun, if the man who had the fun was just pulling the gun on the other man for no apparent reason – if he was just going to rob him or shoot him because he didn’t like him. The only way I could help is either to get a gun and shoot the man with the gun, or take the gun away from him – join the fellow who doesn’t have a gun and both of us gang up on the man with the gun. But white liberals never do that. When the man has the gun, they walk around him and they come to the victim, and they say “Let me help you,” and what they mean is “help you adjust to the situation with the man who has the gun on you."If indeed white liberals are going to help, their only job is to get the gun from the man and talk to him, because he is a sick man. The black man is not the sick man, it is the white man who is sick, he’s the one who picked up the gun.
— Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism
Racism, hate, and bigotry are EVIL and WICKED no matter how you try to rationalize it. I couldn’t imagine living my life with this crap in my heart. I love building new relationships and I enjoy learning about different cultures! If people would change their thinking and open up their hearts, they’d be amazed at the beautiful relationships that they could have. And, for the record, I couldn’t imagine ALL of my friends being black. There are too many amazing people from different backgrounds that I still have yet to meet. NO WAY would I limit my relationships based on race, absolutely not! I am free to like and love who I want to and I won’t allow anybody to persuade me with their opinions. I have my own mind! I’m my own person! I refuse to dislike and/or hate another race ‘just because!’ I am Stephanie Lahart: BOLD. BRAVE. STRONG.
— Stephanie Lahart
Racism is a common delusion, a mental illness that can be cured with truthful education.
— Wayne Gerard Trotman
A bunch of Latinas at Pitzer College decided to let white girls know that they shouldn’t wear hoops anymore, because that’s appropriating a style.... I’ve never worn hoop earrings for the purpose of “feeling ethnic,” nor have I ever associated hoop earrings with a certain culture. They’ve always been an accessory I like. It’s really as simple as that....I can’t wear hoops because I didn’t “create the culture as a coping mechanism for marginalization”? I can’t wear hoops because I’m not a feminist? I can’t wear hoops because some Latinas can’t afford it? I can’t wear hoops because I refuse to buy into your hypersensitive BS?....Does anyone else realize how completely ridiculous that sounds?
— Hannah Bleau
On the sound of handcuffs--"For me it's the sound of all light and hope crashing down on a minority.
— Moctezuma Johnson
I'm not white, no, but I'm just close enough that I could be, and just far enough that you know I'm not. I can check off a diversity box for you and I don't make you nervous - at least not on the surface. I'm the whole package!
— Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
...out of the counterfeiting of the black American's identity [in blackface minstrelsy] there arises a profound doubt in the white man's mind as to the authenticity of his own image of himself. He, after all, went into the business when he refused the king's shilling and revolted. He had put on a mask of his own, as it were...For the ex-colonials, the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask, and it imposed not only the discipline of national self-consciousness, it gave Americans an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality, between the discontinuity of social tradition and that sense of the past which clings to the mind. And perhaps even an awareness of the joke that society is man's creation, not God's. Americans began their revolt from the English fatherland when they dumped the tea into Boston Harbor, masked as Indians, and the mobility of the society created in this limitless space has encouraged the use of the mask for good and evil ever since.
— Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act
Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.
— Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act
America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations
The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations
Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting alone was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
— Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act
Mom talks about moving to Canada as though my father had requested she start wearing fun hats. "Why not try it?" she thought, instead of "This fucking lunatic wants me to go to a country made of ice and casual racism.
— Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
We live in a nation of pigs and murderers.
— James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
The minute we look away, the minute we stop fighting back, that's the minute bigotry wins.
— DaShanne Stokes
Bigotry is based on deception, of oneself and of others.
— DaShanne Stokes
...they ain't never met nobody they didn't lie to and steal from.
— James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
Most people can't tell if I'm European, Asian, African or American. Isn't it good to know my ancestors weren't racist motherfuckers?
— Daniel Marques
Laws ostensibly directed at undocumented immigrants inevitably affect the treatment of lawfully present immigrants and citizens who share the ethnic, racial, or national origin characteristics of undocumented immigrants.
— Pratheepan Gulasekaram, The New Immigration Federalism
Imagine the world as a crayon box, and it took every colour to draw each of us. Adding a shade lighter and darker with each interaction. None would be black or white, either purely absorbing all, or reflecting each. #ColourMeSpotless
— Nikhil Sharda, Sans Destination
The 1790 Naturalization law determined that "free white persons" could naturalize after two years of residency, and established that the children of citizens would also be citizens. Soon after, in 1795, Congress extended the residency period to five years, and in 1798 extended the residency requirement even further, to fourteen years.
— Pratheepan Gulasekaram, The New Immigration Federalism
Racism is not funny, because it won't solve anything, but making it worst instead, because racism is the reason the world is no longer great.
— Werley Nortreus
Tolerance of intolerance enables oppression.
— DaShanne Stokes
White people covered the earth like lice.
— Louise Erdrich, LaRose
Reducing a group to a slur or stereotype reduces us all.
— DaShanne Stokes
Urging an organization to be inclusive is not an attack. It's progress.
— DaShanne Stokes
It's illegal to deny people their records due to race or gender. Adoptees deserve the same rights and protections.
— DaShanne Stokes
Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon.
— DaShanne Stokes
If you kill a black man, the world is silent. You can hear a garage door opening from twenty blocks away. You can pick up a pay phone and only hear the dial tone. Shooting stars sound exactly like the soft laughter of a little girl in Gasworks Park. If you kill a white man, the world erupts with noise: fireworks, sirens, a gavel pounding a desk, the slamming of doors.
— Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer
Marie felt a sudden urge to smash the glass, break down the door, pull down the building. She wanted to tear apart the world. Mather would have never treated a white student that badly, nor would he have shut the door in the face of a man. At that moment, she wanted Dr. Mather to disappear. She wanted every white man to disappear. She wanted to burn them all down to ash and feast on their smoke. Hateful, powerful thoughts. She wondered what those hateful, powerful thoughts could create.
— Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer
They called me an Indian pig. Oh, and they called me a prairie n*****. Pretty colorful, enit?""I suppose.""That one pissed me off, though. I ain't no prairie Indian. I'm from a salmon tribe, man. If they were going to insult me, they should've called me salmon n*****.""I'm surprised you can laugh about this.""It's what Indians do.""Weren't you afraid?""Yeah, I was afraid, but I'm afraid most of the time, you know? How would you feel if a white guy like you got dropped into the middle of a black neighborhood, like Compton, California, on a Saturday night?""I'd be very afraid.""And that's exactly how I feel living in Seattle. Hell, I feel that way living in the United States. Indians are outnumbered, Officer. Those three guys scared me bad, but I've been scared for a long time.
— Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer
You're not under attack when others gain rights and privileges you've always had.
— DaShanne Stokes
Never be content to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon. Your rights could be next.
— DaShanne Stokes
Privilege is not knowing that you're hurting others and not listening when they tell you.
— DaShanne Stokes
We must tell the world that even though we elected a bigot, bigotry will not prevail.
— DaShanne Stokes
Whites saying 'make America white again' is like millionaires saying 'make the wealthy rich again.
— DaShanne Stokes