Best 4508 quotes in «race quotes» category

It is true that humans have physical differences, and some of those differences are spread geographically across the planet. But clinging to old notions about race won't help us understand the nature of those differences—both the ones we can see and the ones we can't.

It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, even though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it's there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself you'd have to add the equivalent describing word and that's how you'd know. The black girl ran across the park.

It may sound like I am making too much out of all this, but the only way you can allow a kid to truly dream is if you expand their idea of what is currently possible. A kid who has nothing, sees nothing, and is taught nothing can only dream of breakfast. They can only hope to get to the next moment successfully. I want more than that for my kids...just like my mom wanted more than that for me. And I want them to want more than that too.

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.

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.

It’s almost like that’s the definition of being American: You love becoming Irish for a day, or becoming Italian… Or becoming a Negro for four years.

It's a scary world we live in when a person of color endorses a racist for president.

It’s different when people who’ve been living under somebody’s boot hate the foot the boot’s on. An oppressed people can’t be racist. They can be bigots, but not racist. You have to have power to be a racist...

It seems to me that the greatest triumph of any human rights movement, be it fighting for racial, religious, sexual or gender equality – is to achieve that moment where eyes are opened so wide that a sort of blindness sets in. I don’t care if someone is black, white, gay or straight. I don’t care if a woman has children or no – I just want to know who they are. [...] At the end of the day, gender differences seem to me to be just a tiny, tiny drop in the great expanse of things that make people unique. Unique, not ‘different’, not ‘other’ merely another piece of that great teaming mass that makes up the wonderfully rich, thrillingly varied definition of ‘humanity’." [Playing Butch: Blog entry, February 24, 2014]

It's hard to catch up when you are running second in a race with time.

It's illegal to deny people their records due to race or gender. Adoptees deserve the same rights and protections.

It’s illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?” “It is.” “Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.

It should be clear by now that whatever Americans say about diversity, it is not a strength. If it were a strength, Americans would practice it spontaneously. It would not require “diversity management” or anti-discrimination laws. Nor would it require constant reminders of how wonderful it is. It takes no exhortations for us to appreciate things that are truly desirable: indoor plumbing, vacations, modern medicine, friendship, or cheaper gasoline. [W]hen they are free to do so, most people avoid diversity. The scientific evidence suggests why: Human beings appear to have deeply-rooted tribal instincts. They seem to prefer to live in homogeneous communities rather than endure the tension and conflict that arise from differences. If the goal of building a diverse society conflicts with some aspect of our nature, it will be very difficult to achieve. As Horace wrote in the Epistles, “Though you drive Nature out with a pitchfork, she will ever find her way back.” Some intellectuals and bohemians profess to enjoy diversity, but they appear to be a minority. Why do we insist that diversity is a strength when it is not? In the 1950s and 1960s, when segregation was being dismantled, many people believed full integration would be achieved within a generation. At that time, there were few Hispanics or Asians but with a population of blacks and whites, the United States could be described as “diverse.” It seemed vastly more forward-looking to think of this as an advantage to be cultivated rather than a weakness to be endured. Our country also seemed to be embarking on a morally superior course. Human history is the history of warfare—between nations, tribes, and religions —and many Americans believed that reconciliation between blacks and whites would lead to a new era of inclusiveness for all peoples of the world. After the immigration reforms of 1965 opened the United States to large numbers of non- Europeans, our country became more diverse than anyone in the 1950s would have imagined. Diversity often led to conflict, but it would have been a repudiation of the civil rights movement to conclude that diversity was a weakness. Americans are proud of their country and do not like to think it may have made a serious mistake. As examples of ethnic and racial tension continued to accumulate, and as the civil rights vision of effortless integration faded, there were strong ideological and even patriotic reasons to downplay or deny what was happening, or at least to hope that exhortations to “celebrate diversity” would turn what was proving to be a problem into an advantage. To criticize diversity raises the intolerable possibility that the United States has been acting on mistaken assumptions for half a century. To talk glowingly about diversity therefore became a form of cheerleading for America. It even became common to say that diversity was our greatest strength—something that would have astonished any American from the colonial era through the 1950s. There is so much emotional capital invested in the civil-rights-era goals of racial equality and harmony that virtually any critique of its assumptions is intolerable. To point out the obvious— that diversity brings conflict—is to question sacred assumptions about the ultimate insignificance of race. Nations are at their most sensitive and irrational where they are weakest. It is precisely because it is so easy to point out the weaknesses of diversity that any attempt to do so must be countered, not by specifying diversity’s strengths—which no one can do—but with accusations of racism.

It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.

It's no longer time to take sides for or against race, rather sides against those who still do.

It’s not how you start that’s important, but how you finish!

It's not 'over-sensitivity' to ask to be treated with the same dignity and respect shown to others.

It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.

It's Saturday; a day off, or it's not; maybe it's a day off connected to countless days off. Some are secure, some not, some wonder. But there's a common thread; each of us having purpose; some living after learning it, some learning while living it, some looking. We are all connected in purpose, all of us loved equally by a race and gender-blind Christ walking with us in that purpose.

It's terrifying to think you could become the next statistic.

It’s unfortunate really—how everyone can live on the same soil yet not even know the first thing about their neighbors.

It was a relatively tolerant town where at least six races with their roots in other districts of the country, in Africa, the West Indies, Central America, Europe, North America, Asia, and other places, lived in a kind of harmony. In three centuries, miscegenation, like logwood, had produced all shades of black and brown, not grey or purple or violet, but certainly there were a few people in town known as red ibos. Creole regarded as a language to be proud of by most people in the country, served as a means of communication amongst the races. Still, in the town and in the country, as people will do everywhere, each race held varying degrees of prejudice concerning the others.

It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its own kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.

It was more comforting to believe that a white powder was the cause of black anger, and that getting rid of the white powder would render black Americans docile and on their knees once again.

I’ve seen it happen over and over again: a black person gets killed just for being black, and all hell breaks loose. I’ve Tweeted RIP hashtags, reblogged pictures on Tumblr, and signed every petition out there. I always said that if I saw it happen to somebody, I would have the loudest voice, making sure the world knew what went down. Now I am that person, and I’m too afraid to speak.

It was ridiculous really. I had just won a major race despite not being in top form, yet I was going to dope.

It would be logical for any group whose only sense of identity is the negative one of wickedness and oppression to dilute its wickedness by mixing with more virtuous groups. This is, upon reflection, exactly what celebrating diversity implies. James Carignan, a city councilor in Lewiston, Maine, encouraged the city to welcome refugees from the West African country of Togo, writing, “We are too homogeneous at present. We desperately need diversity.” He said the Togolese—of whom it was not known whether they were literate, spoke English, or were employable—“will bring us the diversity that is essential to our quest for excellence.” Likewise in Maine, long-serving state’s attorney James Tierney wrote of racial diversity in the state: “This is not a burden. This is essential.” An overly white population is a handicap. Gwynne Dyer, a London-based Canadian journalist, also believes whites must be leavened with non-whites in a process he calls “ethnic diversification.” He noted, however, that when Canada and Australia opened their borders to non-white immigration, they had to “do good by stealth” and not explain openly that the process would reduce whites to a minority: “Let the magic do its work, but don’t talk about it in front of the children. They’ll just get cross and spoil it all.” Mr. Dyer looked forward to the day when politicians could be more open about their intentions of thinning out whites. President Bill Clinton was open about it. In his 2000 State of the Union speech, he welcomed predictions that whites would become a minority by mid-century, saying, “this diversity can be our greatest strength.” In 2009, before a gathering of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, he again brought up forecasts that whites will become a minority, adding that “this is a very positive thing.” [...] Harvard University professor Robert Putnam says immigrants should not assimilate. “What we shouldn’t do is to say that they should be more like us,” he says. “We should construct a new us.” When Marty Markowitz became the new Brooklyn borough president in 2002, he took down the portrait of George Washington that had hung in the president’s office for many years. He said he would hang a picture of a black or a woman because Washington was an “old white man.” [...] In 2000, John Sharp, a former Texas comptroller and senator told the state Democratic Hispanic Caucus that whites must step aside and let Hispanics govern, “and if that means that some of us gringos are going to have to give up some life-long dreams, then we’ve got to do that.” When Robert Dornan of California was still in Congress, he welcomed the changing demographics of his Orange County district. “I want to see America stay a nation of immigrants,” he said. “And if we lose our Northern European stock—your coloring and mine, blue eyes and fair hair—tough!” Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times, appears happy to become a minority. He wrote this about Sonya Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings: “[T]his particular wise Latina, with the richness of her experiences, would far more often than not reach a better [judicial] conclusion than the individual white males she faced in that Senate hearing room. Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past.” It is impossible to imagine people of any other race speaking of themselves this way.

I wanted to drag them all out, flay us all, destroy all the artificial separations of history. You'd merely done what I had, after all--split from two cells into four then eight then sixteen until you've accumulated all your arms and legs and organs and pushed yourself into the world--so fucking what? You honkey, nigger, spic, dyke, cunt. If I cry out, who will hear me?

I used to believe in 'em [lines]. I don't anymore. They in our heads. People like Miss Hilly is always trying to make us believe they there. But they ain't." - Aibileen

I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made fore the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.

I was astonished to see how our leaders treated him only as a threat to their power, inciting mistrust by playing on backward, anti-intellectual ideas about race and class.

I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody's dream of what was right with the world.

I was in my early twenties and I was, to be quite honest, a bit of a punk. A swaggering entitled straight white guy who hadn't but a lot of thought into what it might be like to be anything other than a straight white guy. Because when you're a straight white guy, you don't *have* to think about that....

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

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.

Linnie. And this Winnie.” They wore identical smiles, their bright black eyes sparked with curiosity. “Are you the doctor?” “No, I’m just volunteering.” “I knowed that, too.” Winnie gave her an exaggerated shake of the head. “Girls is never the doctor. They’s the nurses.” “Oh no, what about Dr. Clare? Huh? The lady doctor who took care of Grammy in the hospital when she broke her hip bone?” Linnie asked. “Yeah, but she was a white lady. They can be doctors.” Winnie looked at Lucy. “Right? There are white lady doctors. I seen ‘em.” Lucy felt her eyes go wide. Were there children who still believed your gender or color dictated your career? “There are white lady doctors, black lady doctors, white man doctors, black man doctors.” They stared at her. She thought for a moment. “And there are white man nurses and black man nurses, too.” “Now you’re just bein’ silly,” Linnie said and let out a laugh.

Love Has No Color.... No Race.... Love Is Pure And Divine But Only A Little of Us Are Able To Preserve It's Purity.... Sadly, In This Digital World, Purity Is Rare To Find In Human....

Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it wasn't for race, X-Men doesn't sense. If it wasn't for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of what we call science fiction’s contact stories doesn't make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understood that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible, yeah. In the Green Lantern Corps, we are the oath. We are all of these things—erased, and yet without us—we are essential.

Many laws passed by Congress have grandiose names and are hailed by their sponsors as far more important than they really are. In one case, however, legislators promised little of consequence for a law that reshaped the country. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act, abolished the national-origins immigration quotas set up in 1924 to preserve the European character of the American population. As we saw in the previous chapter, the promoters of the act insisted it would have little effect on the ethnic mix of the country, which was then nearly 90 percent white. By 2008, however, whites had already fallen to 65 percent of the population, and the Census Bureau was predicting they would become a minority in 2042—just 77 years after enactment. This would be a more dramatic long-term effect than perhaps that of any other legislation passed in the 20th century. Post-Hart-Celler immigration has also enormously increased the population of the United States, which is the only industrial nation that is growing like a developing country. In 2010, the population was expanding by about 7,500 people every day—nearly three million a year—and immigrants and their children accounted for 75 percent of the 27.3 million increase from 2000 to 2010. Growth at this rate requires enormous amounts of new infrastructure, including about 8,000 new schools every ten years. In 2008, the Census Bureau projected that the population would expand from 302 million to 439 million by 2050, assuming immigration continues at current rates. If immigration stopped after 2009, there would be much more moderate growth, with the population reaching 345 million rather than 439 million.

Love is kind, Love endures, Love is the machine fueled by hate, We love our race; we kill in the name of it, We destroy lives, and we raise our flag high, so others can see what we can do, We proclaim our race, and our creed, We love our God, and we kill in his name, Hallowed be the name of love, We love our woman and the choice to murder life, We Love; and the fruits of Love are here for us to see, Love came to show us hell, Love came to give us choice, Love’s the machine, and its fuel is hate Blessed be the name of love, the force behind our pride, Love, the flag displayed up high, to show others love is on our side, Love gave us Choice, murder of fetuses, Love your race,hang them if not like you, slaved them, torture them, Murder in the name of Love! “Love and do what you will” (St. Augustine)

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.

Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his extraordinary gift.

Many theories have been advanced to explain racial gaps in performance, of which these are the most common: black and Hispanic schools do not get enough money, their classes are too big, students are segregated from whites, minorities do not have enough teachers of their own race. Each of these explanations has been thoroughly investigated. Urban schools, where non-whites are concentrated, often get more money than suburban white schools, so blacks and Hispanics are not short-changed in budget or class size. Teacher race has no detectable effect on learning (Asians, for example, outperform whites regardless of who teaches them), nor do whites in the classroom raise or lower the scores of students of other races. Money is not the problem. From the early 1970s to the 2006-2007 school year per-pupil spending more than doubled in real terms. The Cato Institute calculates that when capital costs are included, the Los Angeles School District spends more than $25,000 per student per year, and the District of Columbia spends more than $28,000. Neither district gets good results. Demographic change can become a vicious cycle: As more minorities and immigrants enter a school system average achievement falls. More money and effort is devoted to these groups, squeezing gifted programs, music and art, and advanced placement courses. The better-performing students leave, and standards fall further.

[M]any whites flee from diversity, but a few welcome it. Joe and Jessica Sweeney of Peoria, Illinois, had been sending their children to private school but decided the multi-racial experience of public school would be valuable. After the switch, their eight-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter were taunted with racial slurs, and became withdrawn. One day, a black student threatened to kill the girl with a box cutter. The same day, the boy showed his parents a large bruise he got when he was knocked down and called “stupid white boy.” The school reacted with indifference. The Sweeneys sent their children back to private school.” Fourteen-year-old James Tokarski was one of a handful of whites attending Bailly Middle School in Gary, Indiana, in 2006. Black students called him “whitey” and “white trash” and repeatedly beat him up. They knocked him unconscious twice. The school offered James a “lunch buddy,” to be with him whenever he was not in class, but his parents took him out of Bailly. The mother of another white student said it was typical for whites to be called “whitey” or “white boy,” and to get passes to eat lunch in the library rather than face hostile blacks in the lunch room. On Cleveland’s West Side, ever since court-ordered busing began in the 1970s, blacks and Hispanics have celebrated May Day by attacking whites. In 2003, Elsie Morales, a Puerto Rican mother of two, told reporters that when she took part in May Day violence as a student in the 1970s she justified it as payback for white oppression. Her daughter Jasmine said it was still common to attack whites: “It’s like if you don’t jump this person with us, you’re a wimp and we’ll get you next.” In the late 1990s, whites were 41 percent of students in Seattle public schools, blacks were 23, and the rest were Hispanic and Asian. In 1995 and 1999, schools conducted confidential surveys about racial harassment. In both years, a considerably larger percentage of white than black students complained of racial taunts or violence. Only an “alternative” newspaper reported the findings, and school representatives refused to discuss them.

Luther had passed many a white church in his day, heard them singing their hymns and chanting their "Amens" and seen them gather on a porch or two afterward with their lemonade and piety, but he knew if he ever showed up on their steps, starving or injured, the only response he’d get to a plea for human kindness would be the amen of a shotgun pointed in his face.

Mama's antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom, but to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I realize she is wrong. There ain't no antidote to life, I tell her. How free can you be if you really accept that white folks are the traffic cops of your life? Mama tells me that she is not talking about freedom. She says that she is talking about survival.

Many races as well as cultural influences of men of all kinds have mixed into any man. To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory.

means. I try not to roll my eyes. I remember women like me can’t scream at women like her. I can’t grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she listens. I need to cooperate. I need her on my side. I’m already in the negative with her. My build, my skin—shit, even my voice. Brooklyn and I both, since we hit puberty, have deep and raspy voices that can carry across a few rooms. Those Lewis girls sure pack a presence. To the detective, I’ve already been hysterical. To D.A. Flora Rivers, the next step paints me as someone who overreacts, the step beyond that means I’m unreasonable, then hostile and then I’m the one getting arrested. (p. 35) Kindle Edition.

May I say just a word to those of you who are struggling against this evil. Always be sure that you struggle with Christian methods and Christian weapons. Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love. Let no man pull you so low as to hate him

Mick had once come across one of Wilson't books and was surprised to see his face on the back cover. Mick was even more surprised when he read the book. It was pretty good, although Mick was kind of tired of hearing about Indians. Still, Mick thought, Aristotle Little Hawk was a good Indian, even if he was just some character in a book. He wished more Indians like Little Hawk hung out in the bar. He knew Wilson claimed he had some Indian blood, said so inside the book. But Mick did not buy that shit. Mick's great-grandmother was a little bit Indian, but that did not make him Indian. Besides, who the hell would want to be Indian when you could just as easily be white?