c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Nothing changes if we just feel shitty about being White. And nothing changes if we refuse to talk about it. The opposite of white pride does not have to be white shame. We can’t push it away and pretend it’s not us. We are not color-blind, we are not post-race, we do not get to reject our whiteness because it makes us feel bad…This does not get solved with a Celebration of Diversity Day and a coexist bumper sticker. (Kate Schatz)
— Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times
As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with “race.” I didn't know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So when the other kids in Soweto called me "white", even though I was light brown, I just thought that they had their colors mixed up, like they hadn't learned them properly. "Ah, yes, my friend. You've confused aqua with turquoise. I can see how you made that mistake. You're not the first.
— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
They probably don't really like pale skin but they certainly like walking into a store without some security dude following them. Hating Your Goy and Eating One Too, as the great Philip Roth put it. So if everyone in America aspires to be WASPs, then what do WASPs aspire to? Does anyone know?
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Serious history was the West, and the West was white.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
I can’t comprehend why any black man with even a lick of sense would have the slightest bit of interest in time travel. Going backward in time? A black man? You have got to be out of your mind.
— Dexter Palmer, Version Control
Abinia,” he said, pointing toward the chickens, “you look at those birds. Some of them be brown, some of them be white and black. Do you think when they little chicks, those mamas and papas care about that?
— Kathleen Grissom
Whiteness has been, above all, a racial formation that presupposed and reproduced relations of inequality and domination between "whites" and their racial others.
— Moon-kie Jung, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present
I was telling them about back home and how all the boys were chasing me because I was half-caste, and they said I was dissing myself. So now I say biracial, and I'm supposed to be offended when somebody says half-caste. I've met a lot of people here with white mothers and they are so full of issues, eh. I didn't know I was even supposed to have issues until I came to America . Honestly, if anybody wants to raise bi-racial kids, do it in Nigeria
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Don't be envious of the runner in the lane next to you
—  just focus on finishing your race.
If race disappears as a category of official division, as it has in most of the world, this will facilitate the emergence of a plural racial order where the groups exist in practice but are not official recognized - and anyone trying to address racial division is likely to be chided for racializing the population.
— Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States
Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status--none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions.
— Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
Yes, being black is a full-time job: sometimes you are invisible, other times you are hyper-visible,” he says. “Sometimes you are welcome, other times you are not. The thermostat is always moving and you have to keep adapting to find some comfort level. Richard Pryor used to talk about going to Africa and people there telling him he was white. Even though he was black, he just wasn’t black enough.
— Paul Beatty, The Sellout
Here comes the best part,” I say, realizing that I’ve spoken aloud the words I always tease Haddie for when she announces them at the bridge of the song. The lyrics come and I sing along as the words wash over me, moving me as they always do, bringing goose bumps to my flesh. “There you are, sitting in the garden, clutching my coffee, calling me sugar. You called me sugar.”“I don’t get it,” Colton says, “Why is that the best part?”“Because it’s the moment she realizes that he loves her,” I muse, a soft smile on my face.
— K. Bromberg
You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy.""Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
It's hard to catch up when you are running second in a race with time.
— Avinash Rao
You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.
— James Baldwin
Until slow and steady could win the race, being fast and speedier can bring no further grace
— Priyavrat Thareja
Displaced workers, along with others who fear for their livelihood, are fertile ground in which to sow anti-immigrant sentiment, since angry and frustrated people often seek some target on which to blame their problems. The right wing has organized and manipulated such anger and resentment, turned it away from corporations, and directed it against the government, decrying high taxes and the inability of the state to solve problems such as social deterioration, homelessness, crime, and violence. In addition to the target of “failed liberal policies,” immigrants make a convenient and tangible target for people’s anger. Racial prejudice is often an encoded part of the message…Right-wing populist themes are particularly effective at attracting working people disenchanted with the system.
— Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea
At the end of the race nobody really cares about how you started, so stay laser focused and finish strong. Get ready to proclaim "I did it!
— Farshad Asl
there is no stronger taboo today than talking about race. In many cases, just being accused of “racism” can get you fired. Yet, teachers in America know the races differ in school achievement; policemen know the races differ in crime rates; social workers know the races differ in rates of welfare dependency or getting infected with AIDS. And sports fans know that Blacks excel at boxing, basketball, and running. They all wonder why. Some blame poverty, White racism, and the legacy of slavery. Although many doubt that “White racism” really tells the whole story, few dare share their doubts. When it comes to race, do you really dare to say what you think?
— Rushton
Is Obama Anything but Black?So lots of folk—mostly non-black—say Obama’s not black, he’s biracial, multiracial, black-and-white, anything but just black. Because his mother was white. But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass had white fathers. Imagine them saying they were not black.Imagine Obama, skin the color of a toasted almond, hair kinky, saying to a census worker—I’m kind of white. Sure you are, she’ll say. Many American Blacks have a white person in their ancestry, because white slave owners liked to go a-raping in the slave quarters at night. But if you come out looking dark, that’s it. (So if you are that blond, blue-eyed woman who says “My grandfather was Native American and I get discrimination too” when black folk are talking about shit, please stop it already.) In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you. Barack Obama, looking as he does, would have had to sit in the back of the bus fifty years ago. If a random black guy commits a crime today, Barack Obama could be stopped and questioned for fitting the profile. And what would that profile be? “Black Man.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
What if, ladies and gentlemen, today I told you that anyone here who was born on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday was free to leave right now? Also, they'd be given the most central parking spots in the city, and the biggest houses. They would get job interviews before others who were born later in the week, and they'd be taken first at the doctor's office, no matter how many patients were waiting in line. If you were born from Thursday to Sunday, you might try to catch up – but because you were straggling behind, the press would always point to how inefficient you are. And if you complained, you'd be dismissed for playing the birth-day card.” I shrug. “Seems silly, right? But what if on top of these arbitrary systems that inhibited your chances for success, everyone kept telling you that things were actually pretty equal?
— Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things
Did you ever think our misfortune is directly related to your good fortune? Maybe the house your parents bought was on the market because the sellers didn't want my mama in the neighborhood. Maybe the good grades that eventually led you to law school were possible because your mama didn't have to work eighteen hours a day, and was there to read to you at night, or make sure you did your homework. How often do you remind yourself how lucky you are that you own your house, because you were able to build up equity through generations in a way families of color can't? How often do you open your mouth at work and think how awesome it is that no one's thinking you're speaking for everyone with the same skin color you have? How hard is it for you to find the greeting card for your baby's birthday with a picture of a child that has the same color skin as her? How many times have you seen a painting of Jesus that looks like you? Prejudice goes both ways, you know. There are people who suffer from it, and there are people who profit from it.
— Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things
Black skin was filled with so many barriers, so many restrictions, so many.
— Randi Pink, Into White
The only people discussing “race” with any insight and courage are loud middle-aged white men who romanticize the Kennedys and Motown, well-read open-minded white kids like the tie-dyed familiar sitting next to me in the Free Tibet and Boba Fett T-shirt, a few freelance journalists in Detroit, and the American hikikomori who sit in their basements pounding away at their keyboards composing measured and well-thought-out responses to the endless torrent of racist online commentary.
— Paul Beatty, The Sellout
The spectacle of the shooting suggest an event out of time, as if the killing of black people with white-supremacist justification interrupts anything other than regular television programming. But Dylan Storm Roof did not create himself from nothing. He as grown up with the rhetoric and orientation of racism.
— Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race
I DREAM OF A CHARCOAL CHALKY AFRICAI am as black as charcoalBut that is only my skin colorI don’t need to see hacked white bodiesTo know that we are the same on the insideI feel the same anguish and disgust for the innocentMurdered black South Africans during apartheidMurdered white South Africans post-apartheidWe might not be there to fight apartheid era atrocities But we are here now and must prevent post-apartheid atrocities Murdering innocent whites will not bring back murdered blacksI challenge you to search online nowGoogle ‘South African farm murders’And see if you can look at the gruesome picturesOf innocent children, women and menDo we need more people to be horribly hacked to death?Before we stop the divisive rhetoric of the extreme left?We made a mistake letting apartheid drag on so longBut must we repeat that mistake with post-apartheid massacres?Some of these murdered whites fought against apartheidThese murdered children didn’t even know about apartheidDon’t take away your eyes now!No, don’t you dare take your eyes off those pictures!The real apartheid criminals are rich and well protectedKilling these innocent people is not justiceIt is inhuman; it is cowardice Don’t look away and don’t hold back the tearsIt is not only a cry for white victimsIt is not only a cry for black victimsIt is a cry for a better South AfricaA cry for a richer, charcoal, chalky Africa
— Dauglas Dauglas, Roses in the Rainbow
Race, let's remember, is a social invention and a cultural identification, not a biological reality.
— Victoria E. Bynum
If "RACE" becomes the norm, then harmony will not prevail.
— Henry Johnson Jr, Liberian Son
Don't be amazed. There is nothing strange about eight white men being alone and therefore helpless.
— Gordon MacCreagh, White Waters and Black
Upon seeing the third and final table I realized that most of the people listed would most likely be dead, or come out of these qualifying races with severed limbs of as Revaarn liked to say 'Loose a limb no problem, it'll be amputated and replaced with a robotic one.
— Charon Lloyd-Roberts, STEDFARST
The new vantage from which Christian theology as a discourse on Christian identity must operate in the modern world, then, is the Christological horizon of Mary-Israel. To be Christian is to enter into this horizon. But where is the horizon concretely displayed, where is it made visible if not in despised dark (and especially dark female) flesh? Is this not the flesh of homo sacer . . .the flesh that is impoverished, "despised and rejected of men," flesh that in shame we "hide our faces from" (cf. Isa. 53:3)? But if this is the case, it follows that the poverty of dark flesh is where one finds the wealthy God. . . In (Christ"s) taking on the form of the slave, the from of despised dark (female) flesh there is the diclsoure (sic) of divinity, a disclosure that undoes the social arrangement of the colonial-racial tyranny (tynannos,), as the seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor called it, that is the darker side of modernity
— J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account
Seeing race is always about discriminating, a discerning, trained eye recognizing the "essential" or defining characteristic in the individual that confers racial categorization.
— Barbara Katz Rothman, Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations: The Limits of Science in Understanding Who We Are
When you've learned to both see and not see the resemblance, then you see the uniqueness.
— Barbara Katz Rothman, Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations: The Limits of Science in Understanding Who We Are
We have disagreements as to what race does and ought to mean, but we have a remarkable consensus on what it is, without any ability to define it technically.
— Barbara Katz Rothman, Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations: The Limits of Science in Understanding Who We Are
he lived in London indeed but invisibly, his existence like an erased pencil sketch
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
After using a paint chart from a local DIY superstore to identify the skin tone of his penis as midnight chocolate, Miriam stayed down on one knee and offered him the citizenship he had always wanted and the middle-aged white woman he would grudgingly accept.
— David F. Porteous, Good Witch
No one in the world -- in the entire world -- know more -- knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here -- and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other.
— James     Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
Social Darwinism had continued to flourish in German. Together with Mendelian genetics, it was widely thought to provide a scientific basis for the eugenic ‘Racial Hygiene’ movement.
— Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream…The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried out best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
— Ta-Nahisi Coates
As best I could I had answered their many questions. They were surprised when I told them that Europeans were, with minor differences, exactly like them, marrying and bringing up their children in accordance with principles and traditions, that they had good morals and were in general good people."Are there any farmers among them?" Mahjoub asked me."Yes, there are some farmers among them. They’ve got everything—workers and doctors and farmers and teachers, just like us." I preferred not to say the rest that had come to my mind: that just like us they are born and die, and in the journey from the  cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated; that they fear the unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child; that some are strong and some are weak; that some have been given more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the differences are narrowing and most of the weak are no longer weak. I did not say this to Mahjoub, though I wish I had done so, for he was intelligent; in my conceit I was afraid he would not understand.
— Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
If we conservatives “of color” refuse to promote the welfare state, unfettered abortion, affirmative action, and massive immigration, we are guilty of “selling out.
— Michelle Malkin
Canadian official multiculturalism has developed through the 1970s and '80s, and has become in the '90s a major part of Canadian political discourse in Canada rather than in the United States, which is also a multi-ethnic country, may be due to the lack of an assimilationist discourse so pervasive in the U.S. The melting pot thesis has not been popular in Canada, where the notion of a social and cultural mosaic has had a greater influence among liberal critics. This mosaic approach has not been compensated with an integrative politics of antiracism or of class struggle which is sensitive to the racialization involved in Canadian class formation. The organized labour movement in Canada has repeatedly displayed anti-immigrant sentiments. For any inspiration for an antiracist theorization and practice of class struggle Canadians have looked to the United States or the Caribbean.
— Himani Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and Gender
White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn’t threatening
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
the country is almost ruined with pious white people: such pious politicians as we have just before elections, such pious goings on in all departments of church and state, that a fellow does not know who'll cheat him next.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Are you not in a race
—  and is not the prize the crown of glory
First, we are a nation of different races, nationalities, and ethnic groups. This brings us to the second commonality… we are all Americans. Yes, we fuss, we have differences of opinions, but we are all Americans. The third and most important commonality is the fact that we all bleed red. We are humankind. These are the bonds that unite us and make us better human beings.
— James Morris Robinson, Genesis: A New World Order
Everyone's colored, or you wouldn't be able to see them.
— Captain Beefheart
If you’re looking for fast driving there’s a dragway in the southwestern part of the county. It opens next week.”“Do you race there?” he asks.“Yes.” And I plan on spending a lot of time there over the next six weeks.“Isaiah.” Beth attempts to step in between us, but Logan angles himself so that she can’t. “That’s not why I brought him here.”An insane glint strikes the guy’s eyes and all of a sudden, I feel a connection to him. A twitch of his lips shows he might be my kind of crazy. “How fast do the cars there go?”“Some guys hit speeds of 120 mph in an eighth mile.”“No!” Beth stomps her foot. “No. I promised Ryan nothing crazy would happen. Logan, this is not why I brought you here.”“Have you hit those speeds?” He swats his hand at Beth as if she’s a fly, earning my respect. Most guys would be terrified of having their balls ripped off and handed to them for dismissing Beth like that.“Not driving my car, I haven’t,” I answer honestly. But I hope to with Rachel’s car, and with mine, after a few modifications. “Speed can be bought. Just depends on how much you want to spend.”Logan offers his hand. “I’m Logan.”“Isaiah,” I say as we shake.“Shit,” mumbles Beth.
— Katie McGarry, Crash into You
Our political discourse has degenerated into anxieties about whether giving benefits to those people over there will take money out of the pockets of my kind of people over here, even when the changes are those from which we would all benefit.""The church is one of the few remaining institutions in the American scene that normalizes the effects of slavery, with most Christians preserving these segregated spaces in the interests of cultural comfort. Racially separate churches violate the interdependence that should characterize authentic Christian communities. Further, this individualism blocks churches from the blessings of gifts preserved in separate traditions. For example, segregated white churches celebrate the confessions and the rich legacies of the intellectual giants of the faith, but too often preach a weak and disembodied gospel that reduces spirituality to symbolism, and that separates material concerns from moral choices and the pursuit of righteousness.""Indeed, we have reached a sad state of affairs when we are all unwilling to be challenged when we go to church." "We should not move too quickly to a cheap reconciliation that forgets the past rather than honoring it as a clay vessel that contains a refined treasure bearing witness to the presence of Jesus at the margins. We need to make space for the histories of ethnic pain to be shared and revered among whites and all peoples of color, and to be instructed by them. That is, we need to understand how our past impinges on the present before we can move forward together toward our future. We cannot be who we are called to be unless we can gain access to the treasures of the gospel that have been preserved in the separate traditions of now segregated ethnic churches. We will not testify to the glory of God and the manifold riches of his mercy to the nations until we do.
— Love L. Sechrest
Do I love Black people? Yes. As much as I love my own race.Do Black lives matter?Of course.Will I oppress my spirit with White Guilt and faulty notions of White Privilege?Hell no.Gotta love yourself before you can love anyone else.
— Jonathan Heatt
What I was pointing to was that, yeah, blackness is a fiction; whiteness is a fiction. When we live according to these categories, we’re living within a fiction. Of course, it’s a fiction with very real consequences.
— Jess Row
The race bullies win by relying on racial guilt. But collective racial guilt can only separate Americans. We are individuals, not homogenous members of racial subsets. Only when we learn to cherish the words of Martin Luther King, judging people as individuals, will we truly have the guts to stand up to the race bullies. After all, to paraphrase a man who once stood for unification rather than division, we're not black America or white America. We're the United States of America. We're brothers and sisters.If we don't begin to recognize that simple truth -- and recognize the inherent goodness of America, and our ability to look beyond skin color and ethnic heritage -- the race bullies will continue to tear American down for their own political gain, brick by brick.
— Ben Shapiro, Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans
In later years, I confess that I do not envy the white boy as I once did. I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.
— Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it.
— Studs Terkel
A person should be important to you for you to be also important to the person so that you will be important to any other person.
— Boakye Opoku Agyemang
I prefer being curious, mischievous and clever black monkey to being filthy, greedy and bad mannered white pig.
— Boakye Opoku Agyemang
It's no longer time to take sides for or against race, rather sides against those who still do.
— Brian Spellman, If the mind fits, shrink it
There remains a problem with race in America because of the church's failure to understand the issues from a biblical perspective." "Rather than being called into a different community by Scripture, we see our broken communities as justified by Scripture.""Rather than challenge the worldly status quo, religious groups perpetuate stereotypes, sectarianism, and schisms when accepting ethnic denominational identities- inverting Pentecost by reading in multiple languages unrecognized by listeners and offering separate worship services according to musical preference." "Ultimately, our aim is to draw attention to the biblical narrative from which comes to the strength for the long road of reconciliation.
— Joy Moore
We have to start with recognition of the issue, confession that it exists, and a willingness to change. The fundamental problem is that white people who own the system as it is now do not allow the absence of black people to bother them.""It has not dawned on enough whites that the real issue is the integrity of the gospel itself and, consequently, the integrity of our witness to the rest of the world-where the majority is blessedly nonwhite.
— William Pannell
It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.
— Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the lifelong race.
— Robert W. Service
We still tell each other that we are lucky to be alive, when our being alive has almost nothing to do with luck, but with geography, pigmentation, and international exchange rates.
— Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea
Ethnic minorities were 10 times more likely than whites to eat at a table where they were the only representative of their race.
— Rebekah Nathan, My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student
There is no inconsistency whatsoever between the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land and the exis­tence of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness. The current sys­tem of control depends on black exceptionalism
—  it is not disproved or undermined by it.
The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
— James     Baldwin
You can beat me in the rat race, but remember u still remain a rat.
— Reetwika Banerjee, Fantastic 40 - A Collection of 40 Micro Stories
What is key to America’s understanding of class is the persistent belief — despite all evidence to the contrary — that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one’s character. By extension, the failure of a race or ethnic group to move up reflects very poorly on the group as a whole.
— Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Once outside, the detectives advanced up an escalator and to a floor with two elevators. One was labeled for the staff, and the other for guests. In the corner was a plain grey door which led up a staircase.“Monsieur Leor…” Jean began. “Are you up for a challenge?”“You want to run up the staircase.” Leor concluded, plainly. “Like schoolboys?”“Ouais, monsieur,” Jean replied, with a silly grin. “You can consider it your preliminary training, if that helps your dignity.
— Zechariah Barrett, Beyond Chivalry
When you're of a different race people distrust you because they are afraid. If you don't give them reason to dislike you, it becomes their problem, not yours.
— Elizabeth Haydon, The Floating Island
No religion, No race, No countries, Today we are human.
— Sixeye
In their own way, Tom Robinson's manners were as good as Atticus's
— Harper Lee
Rather than evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and outright contempt. But mostly it's bred indifference.
— Barack Obama
This writing thing, it ain’t like that hip hop shit, City. For li’l niggas like you,” he told me, “this writing thing is like a gotdamn porta potty. It’s one li’l nigga at a time, shitting in the toilet, funking up the little space he get. And you shit a regular shit or a classic shit. Either way,” he said. “City, you gotta shit classic, then get your black ass on off the pot.” He actually grabbed my hand. “You probably think I’m hyping you just for the money. It ain’t just about the money. It’s really not. It’s about doing whatever it takes for you to have your voice heard. So I don’t know what you’re writing in that book you always carrying around, but it better be classic because you ain’t gonna get no two times to get it right, you hear me?
— Kiese Laymon, Long Division
In this town, white politicians and black ministers seemed to go together like tears and tissues. At election time, the pols got religion and came looking for the blessings of black ministers as a way to get black votes without providing the kinds of services to black communities that they at least promised to East Boston and Charlestown and the other mostly white Boston neighborhoods.
— Barbara Neely
Most races have a finish line, but some racists are running races where since they never hit the finish line, they never finish lying.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
She learned early on, in her adopted country, that race was an easy excuse to stop awkward explanations. People hesitated to probe into such a sensitive matter.
— E. Journey, Welcome, Reluctant Stranger
We play into the definitions and stereotypes others impose on us and accept the model-minority myth, thinking it's positive, but it's a trap just like any stereotype. They put a piece of model-minority cheese between the metal jaws of their mousetrap, but we're lactose intolerant anyway! We can't even eat the cheese.
— Eddie Huang, Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir
People aren't social, they're tribal. Race doesn't exist, but tribes are fucking real.
— Mat Johnson, Loving Day
This past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering – enough is certainly as good as a feast – but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth – and indeed, no church – can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worse that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one’s bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry.
— James     Baldwin
No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition whites show towards me…as long as that same respect and recognition isn’t shown towards everyone of our people in this country–it doesn’t exist for me.
— Malcolm X
If there is such a things as "race", there is only the Human one.
— Tim Heaton
He didn’t see a man with hopes and dreams, with disappointments and accomplishments. All he saw in front of him was just another nigger.
— Kenneth Eade, Unreasonable Force
White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as "tokenism". For hard example, white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite of the mountain of evidence that has since accumulated to the contrary, that this was proof of a change of heart – or, as they like to say, progress. Perhaps. It all depends on how one reads the word "progress". Most of the Negroes I know do not believe that this immense concession would ever have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War, and the fact that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had, for political reasons, to be wooed by the descendants of her former masters. Had it been a matter of love or justice, the 1954 decision would surely have occurred sooner; were it not for the realities of power in this difficult era, it might very well not have occurred yet.
— James     Baldwin
On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
If there’s one shade a woman of colour can’t wear it’s got to be the one everyone expects, hasn’t it?
— Sara Sheridan, British Bulldog
Lucy saw the delighted expressions of the guests and knew they looked like something out an Austen movie. Well, at least Jem did. She giggled a little and cleared her throat.	“Something funny?” he murmured out of the corner of his mouth.	“Just thinking how you’re just like Captain Wentworth and I’m just like Tina Turner.
— Mary Jane Hathaway, Persuasion, Captain Wentworth and Cracklin' Cornbread
The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated -- that's the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don't get a lot of practical experience.
— Ben Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer
We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.
— Kiese Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!-Incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea-and put him at the head of the procession.
— Mark Twain
Unfortunately, honesty hasn't always been a part of the job description for the police force, especially when dealing with our people. Today I must appeal to their sense of integrity, because we need the Mobile Police Department. Before we can do our job, they've got to do theirs...
— Ravi Howard
In my quest to find Green Cottenham, I also discovered an unsettling truth that when white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our "fault". But it is undeniably our inheritance.
— Douglas A. Blackmon
By unspoken agreement, we all picked an invisible line in the cracked asphalt and toed it.
— Chistopher McDougall
If you chose Option 2 [confrontation], you did well. People will be less likely to engage you in office small talk of any kind, but that's likely a benefit when you consider the fact that every ten minutes of office small talk takes one year off of your life.
— Baratunde R. Thurston
Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945 - well into the childhoods of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age. The clock must be reset.
— Douglas A. Blackmon
See, a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That's all. The rest you can deal with. It's not about black or white. It's about God and don't let anyone tell you different. All this Jungle fever! Shoot! The Jungle fever goes away, honey, and then what are you gonna do?
— James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
Obama will win. We will win. Then we will continue to lose. And the right questions will never be honestly asked or answered, and it's all just too much.
— Kiese Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
I'm white and I don't dance, but that doesn't mean I have all the answers.
— Charles Portis
I tried to get away from him, to get to that door, but instead I backed up against the wall and was stuck there in that white, white room.
— Louise Erdrich
The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
Race is there. You're tire of hearing about it? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it.
— Jon Stewart
Run the race of life at your own pace.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, The Alphabets of  Success: Passion Driven Life
There is nothing like race, is there?
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
p 18 - Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face in the same primeval forest. That we are here today evidences their victory.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
I believe that reappropriation can be a powerful tool for creating social change. Sometimes, things like irony, satire, or humor are more effective in getting at difficult truths or concepts like white privilege, orientalism, and the exoticization of culture.
— Simon S. Tam
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?
— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
We got a call from across the street that a black woman had broken into this house.”“And you were going to arrest her without even knocking on the door?”“We had to secure her first. Um. Are you okay, ma’am?”“Of course I am. Don’t you see me?”“Because we have her in custody. You don’t have to be afraid.”“I’m not afraid of my daughter-in-law, Mrs. Theon Pinkney. She’s the one who should be afraid. Four big men grabbing her and putting her in chains. What’s wrong with you?”The police stood there, slightly confused. I could see that they felt justified, even righteous, for grabbing me in Marcia’s driveway. There was no question in their minds that I was a criminal and that they were on the side of the Law.Marcia glanced at me then. We’d spent hours together but it was as if she hadn’t really gotten a good look at me until seeing the tableau in her driveway.
— Walter Mosley, Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore
Ask anyone concerned with race to fast, and take note of the response you receive.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
P44- in tarzans clever little mind many thoughts revolved and back of these was his divine power of reason.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
She got a long pointed nose and big fleshy mouth. Lips look like black plum. Eyes big, glossy. Feverish. And mean. Like, sick as she is, if a snake cross her path, she kill it
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
The media will mess your way of thinking up, don't take they word for nothing do your on research.
— Alcurtis Turner
Minority conservatives hold a special place of gutter contempt in the minds of unhinged liberals, who can never accept the radical concept of a person of color rejecting identity politics.
— Michelle Malkin
The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves. They did not want the content of her ideas; they merely wanted the gesture of her presence. They had not read her blog but they had heard that she was a “leading blogger” about race.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
People run away from the love game because they know they won't win the race.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this “condition” affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.
— Danzy Senna, Caucasia
Let us face ourselves. We are Hyperboreans!
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Even she hair itself rough and wiry; long black knotty locks springing from she scalp and corkscrewing all the way down she back... The only thing soft about Tan-Tan is she big molasses-brown eyes that could look on you, and your heart would beat time...
— Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber
Skin color doesn't make you different,' Melody said. 'We're all the same on the inside.' 'The only people who ever say that,' Raymon replied, 'are white.
— Jodi Picoult, The Color War
In every four there is one the slowest, and one the swiftest; and while the race is always to the slowest, the trouble is always with the swiftest.
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present
—  and an understanding of the facts of the problem -- a magnanimous understanding by both races -- is the first step toward its solution.
Trying to be white? What the hell does that mean? I've never understood that. How could anyone be white when they aren't white? Seems like a simple enough thing to prove, right? Hold out your arm next to someone else's arm and do a simple swatch test. Of course, what people mean when they say that is that there's some kind of authentic black experience that the accused isn't properly expressing. But what is the authentic experience? Clothes that wannabe gangbangers wear on the street? Hood style? What's authentic about that? For that matter, is fashion even a good marker of authenticity or race, anyway? Aren't clothes a second skin you wear over your real skin to obscure who you really are? Can they also express who you really are?
— Ahmir Questlove Thompson, Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
Skin color doesn't make you different," Melody said. "We're all the same on the inside."The only people who ever say that," Raymond replied, "are white.
— Jodi Picoult, The Color War
Yeah, Mel! If she shoves you again, smack her in the face!" bellowed Mika.Kira glared at Mika. "I mean, beat her in the race!
— Katie Mattie, M.A.J.I.C. and the Oracle at Delphi
The perpetrator is a person. He’s got blood flowing in his or her veins. Does it matter if he or she is Black or White? What does it count if the perpetrator is Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist or what have you? Does the person’s sexuality matter? Does it matter if the villain is Conservative or Lib Dem?
— S.A.  David, Wednesday
The race was on
—  the souls of the racers were in it
The Jews could be put down very plausible as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.
— H.L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods
This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best — less trouble).
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth
I've always wanted to race cars, even since I was a young boy, as I think a lot of guys have.
— Paul Walker, The Fast and the Furious 2
[Jesus Christ] used to have blue eyes but I painted them brown like mine and everybody’s, to make him normal.
— NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names