Best 4508 quotes in «race quotes» category

A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State. The slaughter in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, was not merely the action of a mob.

Ancient historians tell us that one of the symptoms of a declining civilization is a desexualization of the human race, with men becoming more effeminate and women becoming more masculine, not only in physical [appearance] but in their basic characters.

And when we talk about race today, with all the pain packed into that conversation, the Holy Spirit remains in the room, This doesn't mean the conversations aren't painful, aren't personal, aren't charged with emotion. But it does mean we can survive. We can survive honest discussions about slavery, about convict leasing, about stolen land, deportation, discrimination, and exclusion. We can identify the harmful politics of gerrymandering, voter suppression, criminal justice laws, and policies that disproportionately affect people of color negatively. And we can expose the actions of white flight, the real impact of all-white leadership, the racial disparity in wages, and opportunities for advancement. We can lament and mourn. We can be livid and enraged. We can be honest. We can tell the truth. We can trust that the Holy Spirit is here. We must. For only by being truthful about how we got here can we begin to imagine another way.

...and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people frount countries created by Britain.

An emotional man with bushy eyebrows tells us that if the proposed mosque is built in Bendigo 'the foundation of Australia will be lost forever'. His first example: Muslims sometimes pray on the street outside the mosque. 'They block off the entire street!' he shouts. 'And I ask you today, if you've got a child at home with an egg or nut allergy and they go into anaphylactic shock, how is the ambulance care going to get to that child?' The dastardly Muslims–peanut allergy connection! You really can reverse-park anything into your belief system.

And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.

An institution rooted in slavery cannot be the voice of our people.

An HBCU that is not inherently revolutionary is irrelevant.

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!

Any fair consideration of the depth and width of enslavement tempts insanity. First conjure the crime--the generational destruction of human bodies--and all of its related offenses--domestic terrorism, poll taxes, mass incarceration. But then try to imagine being an individual born among the remnants of that crime, among the wronged, among the plundered, and feeling the gravity of that crime all around and seeing it in the sideways glances of the perpetrators of that crime and overhearing it in their whispers and watching these people, at best, denying their power to address the crime and, at worst, denying that any crime had occurred at all, even as their entire lives revolve around the fact of a robbery so large that it is written in our very names. This is not a thought experiment. America is literally unimaginable without plundered labor shackled to a plundered land, without the organizing principle of whiteness as citizenship, without the culture crafted by the plundered, and without that culture itself being plundered.

A parish is no longer a really Catholic parish in spirit if on the grounds of race it bans any people from its ministrations or treats them in matters that belong to the parish as minors or unequals.

Another reason for our passivity is the fact that Hispanics are now 16 percent of the population, and their numbers are growing. Politicians from both parties say they cannot afford to alienate Hispanics because of their increasing power at the ballot box. But what do Hispanics want? Amnesty for illegal immigrants and yet more Hispanic immigration. It is folly for white politicians to think they will win the loyalty of Hispanic voters by endorsing policies that increase Hispanic power. As Hispanics gain in numbers and influence, they will replace non-Hispanic politicians with Hispanics. Foolish whites will be shoved out just as blacks shoved out Chris Bell, the white Democratic congressman from Texas [...] who was left sputtering that blacks forgot all about his career of “fighting for diversity” once they had a chance to vote for a black. It is already nearly impossible to discuss immigration rationally, or even enforce laws that are on the books. If we are afraid to take measures that might upset 16 percent of the population, what are our chances of defending larger interests if Hispanics are 20, 30, or even 40 percent of the country? We already have tens of millions of citizens whose primary loyalty is not to the United States but to Mexico. If there were a crisis with Mexico is there any doubt which side they would take? The United States already finds it difficult to advance its own interests against Mexican opposition. As the Mexican-American population grows, it could become impossible.

As a Christian from a Muslim background, I find it fascinating that the culture of confusion speedily brands someone that criticizes Islam to be a racist. Islam is religion, not a race. People from many races and ethnicities embrace Islam. Calling someone a racist for criticizing Islam ignores Islam's racial and ethnic diversity. And so one could more justifiably call such a confused use of the term 'racist' to be, well racist itself.

A race is a life that is born when you get up in the morning and dies when you cross the finish line.

As a journalist, in blindly, parroting these police reports, I am also leaving out a significant amount of social context- the context, and begging question all social institutions ought to consider, of whether it is actually advantageous to anyone to persecute nonviolent offenders with a medieval vigilance that feeds the very problems it hopes to fight, and to waste both police resources and valuable news time lending importance to something that is so obviously only “News” in the way that it highlights a particularly ugly facet of our criminal justice system, and by doing so, we lend it a power which is ethically not its due.

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.

an unintentionally hilarious 84 percent of users answer this match question… Would you consider dating someone who has a vocalized a strong negative bias toward a certain race of people? In the absolute negative (choosing “No” over “Yes” and “It Depends”. In light of the previous data, that means 84 percent of people on OKCupid would not consider dating someone on OKCupid.

... as a reminder that a white man could still kill him for nothing.

As a citizen of the world, I will not confine myself within the gates of one nation or religion. I will not identify with only one species, sex, class or race; for I am a complete being, and that means that I embrace all of humanity, all of nature, every star and universe within the greater universe as a part of me. If we were all created in the image of God, and his love is unconditional, then why can't we love all living things with the same eyes as God? How can anybody say that one race is more superior than another, when we were all created in God's reflection?

As for the majority, it is not so much race as it is political affiliation that really divides it today. What was once an issue of physical difference is now one of intellectual difference. Men have yet to master disagreeing without flashing all their frustrations that come with it; the conservative will throw half-truths while the liberal will throw insults. Combine these and what do you get? A dishonest mockery of a country.

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.

ASIO turned up on Hamza's doorstep a year ago, after he and his mate, both in their mid-twenties, returned from Yemen. They weren't charged with anything but they were placed on no-fly lists. Hamza is convinced ASIO is monitoring their phones and watching their homes. So, as a workaround, he, the paladin dwarf, and his mate, a gnome, skip through forests in World of Warcraft, chatting business over their headsets. I ask him what he was doing in Yemen. 'Okay, now this... what you're getting to now, is a dangerous area.' He pauses. 'I was eating pizza.' He asks for a selfie with me. He says the gnome will be stoked because they had to lie low at one point and were confined to a small apartment in Yemen. They passed the time watching Breaking Bad and John Safran vs God. Pretty chuffed by the inroads I've made into the jihadi demographic.

Ask anyone concerned with race to fast, and take note of the response you receive.

Association of race with a particular type of labor and standard of living is a common phenomenon

As Bangladeshi human rights lawyer Zia Haider Rahman has written, “Anyone who has worked in the field of international development, as I have, will tell you that nation-building in states that are ethnically homogenous, all other things being equal, is an easier task than nation-building where there is diversity.” According to one model of conflict, sectarian violence occurs most easily when one ethnic group is large enough to impose cultural norms in public areas but not large enough to make sure everyone abides by them. Researchers at Brandeis University concluded that when groups are separated in clearly demarcated territories there is little violence because no group tries to force its rules on another. Milica Zarkovic Bookman, who is an expert on ethnic struggle, especially in the Balkans, underlines the significance of race: 'Assimilation takes place in the spheres of religion and language most easily and is most successful among people who are culturally similar to the dominant group. When race is the distinguishing feature, assimilation efforts become irrelevant.

Asians are still a small minority—14.5 million (including about one million identified as part Asian) or 4.7 percent of the population—but their impact is vastly disproportionate to their numbers. Forty-four percent of Asian-American adults have a college degree or higher, as opposed to 24 percent of the general population. Asian men have median earnings 10 percent higher than non Asian men, and that of Asian women is 15 percent higher than non-Asian women. Forty-five percent of Asians are employed in professional or management jobs as opposed to 34 percent for the country as a whole, and the figure is no less than 60 percent for Asian Indians. The Information Technology Association of America estimates that in the high-tech workforce Asians are represented at three times their proportion of the population. Asians are more likely than the American average to own homes rather than be renters. These successes are especially remarkable because no fewer than 69 percent of Asians are foreign-born, and immigrant groups have traditionally taken several generations to reach their full economic potential. Asians are vastly overrepresented at the best American universities. Although less than 5 percent of the population they account for the following percentages of the students at these universities: Harvard: 17 percent, Yale: 13 percent, Princeton: 12 percent, Columbia: 14 percent, Stanford: 25 percent. In California, the state with the largest number of Asians, they made up 14 percent of the 2005 high school graduating class but 42 percent of the freshmen on the campuses of the University of California system. At Berkeley, the most selective of all the campuses, the 2005 freshman class was an astonishing 48 percent Asian. Asians are also the least likely of any racial or ethnic group to commit crimes. In every category, whether violent crime, white-collar crime, alcohol, or sex offenses, they are arrested at about one-quarter to one-third the rate of whites, who are the next most law-abiding group. It would be a mistake, however, to paint all Asians with the same brush, as different nationalities can have distinctive profiles. For example, 40 percent of the manicurists in the United States are of Vietnamese origin and half the motel rooms in the country are owned by Asian Indians. Chinese (24 percent of all Asians) and Indians (16 percent), are extremely successful, as are Japanese and Koreans. Filipinos (18 percent) are somewhat less so, while the Hmong face considerable difficulties. Hmong earn 30 percent less than the national average, and 60 percent drop out of high school. In the Seattle public schools, 80 percent of Japanese-American students passed Washington state’s standardized math test for 10th-graders—the highest pass rate for any ethnic group. The group with the lowest pass rate—14 percent—was another “Asian/Pacific Islanders” category: Samoans. On the whole, Asians have a well-deserved reputation for high achievement.

As I’ve been telling your, son, you get nowhere looking at clothes and the color of the skin to judge a man. It won’t tell you nothing about what’s inside. That’s where a fellow’s mettle is, and that’s what counts.

Ask yourself this question: Of this had been a white child found dead in a black neighborhood, would they be knocking on every door? 'Yes, sir.' Searching high and low? 'Yes, indeed.' It this had been a white child, would they paint him as a sinner and not a saint? 'Lord, no...

As they walked out of the store, Ifemelu said, “I was waiting for her to ask ‘Was it the one with two eyes or the one with two legs?’ Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?’” Ginika laughed. “Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.

As with outlaw figures, in diverse musical and oral cultures throughout the world- Mexican corridos and Egyptian shaabi music, for example- Hip Hop's irreverence toward dominant values and noncompliance with the status quo creates alternative, counterhegemonic spaces.

At its worst, crime turns parts of our country into what one journalist calls “budding Mogadishus,” named after the capital of Somalia where, for years, there has been no government: 'L.A.’s hot zones are tiny, intensely dangerous areas where nothing works, where law has broken down and mainstream institutions simply fail. Places where mail carriers and meter readers balk when the bullets fly. Where paramedics and firefighters are hesitant to enter because of the crossfire. Where police officers go in only heavily reinforced or with helicopters . . . .' Race is part of it. According to one calculation of homicide victimization rates for men, ages 15 to 29, Hispanics in Los Angeles are killed at seven times the white rate and blacks at 21 times the white rate. Hardly any are killed by whites. Calling these places “Mogadishus” may be an insult to the Somalis. When CNN compiled a list of the ten most dangerous cities in the world in 2010, Mogadishu was not on it. Detroit and New Orleans were—in third and fourth places, after Baghdad and Caracas and ahead of Kinshasa and Beirut.

[…] as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were by default unlovable and unloved; that you were presumptively a nobody, a mute and servile figure, distinguishable above all by your total incapacity to threaten anyone; that you were many laudable things that the world might respect and reward, but that you were fundamentally powerless to affect anyone in a way that would make you either loved or feared. What was the epistemological status of such an extravagant assertion? Could it possibly be true? Could it survive empirical scrutiny? It was a dogmatic statement at once unprovable and unfalsifiable. It was a paranoid statement about the way others regarded you that couldn’t possibly be true in any literal sense. It had no real truth value, except that under certain conditions, one felt it with every fibre of one’s being to be true.

As whites cease to be the mainstream, their interests become less important. In 2008, the College Board, the New York-based non profit that administers Advanced Placement (AP) tests, announced it was dropping AP courses and exams in Italian, Latin literature, and French literature. Blacks and Hispanics are not interested in those subjects, and they were the groups the College Board wanted to reach. In Berkeley, California, the governance council for the school district came up with a novel plan for bridging the racial achievement gap: eliminate all science labs, fire the five teachers who run them, and spend the money on “underperforming” students. The council explained that science labs were used mainly by white students, so they were a natural target for cuts. Many schools have slashed enriched programs for gifted students because so few blacks and Hispanics qualify for them. Evanston Township High School in Illinois prides itself on diversity and academic excellence but, like so many others, is dismayed that the two do not always go together. In 2010 it eliminated its elite freshman honors courses in English because hardly any blacks or Hispanics met the admission criteria. The honors biology course was scheduled for elimination the next year.

At home they thought of white people as a vague but powerful entity--like the forces that control the weather, that capable of destruction, that hidden from view.

A ‘white’ kid that asks too many questions is called *curious.* A ‘black’ kid that asks too many questions is called *forward.*

At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.

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!

Before you were born, and were still too tiny for the human eye to see, you won the race for life from among 250 million competitors. And yet, how fast you have forgotten your strength, when your very existence is proof of your greatness.

Before moving to America, I did not see the world through a "Black" lens...We had doctors, teachers, wealthy men. Indeed, we had successful men of all stripes. We did not have Black doctors, Black businessmen, or any so-called role models. We had people doing things we children knew we could just as easily do when we grew up.

Before America, I was not Black. I was not adrift in a sea of White that I constantly had to come to terms with, against which my very humanity is measured--by Whites, Blacks, the world, and even myself. Black exists only because America is White.

Black bodies have become ornamental, haven't they?

Black people rarely forgave whites for being ragged, unkempt and uncaring. There was a saying which explained the disapproval: 'You been white all your life. Ain't got no further along than this? What ails you?

Black skin was filled with so many barriers, so many restrictions, so many.

...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it.

By unspoken agreement, we all picked an invisible line in the cracked asphalt and toed it.

[C]an readers think of instances in which blacks publicly urged other blacks to set aside racial concerns, to consider themselves Americans first, and to work for the good of all? When have black authority figures expressed regret for even the most horrific anti-white crimes? When have blacks praised diversity if it meant giving up black majorities? How many wealthy blacks make charitable donations to broadly American rather than explicitly black institutions? When has a black person publicly chided other blacks for excessive concern with narrowly black issues? Blacks differ from whites both in what they say and do and what they do not say or do. We find among many blacks—perhaps the majority—a view of race sharply at odds with what the civil rights movement was presumably working for: the elimination of race as a relevant category in American life. White racism is commonly alleged to be the great obstacle to harmonious race relations in the United States, but whites are the only group that actually subscribes to the goal of eliminating race consciousness and that actively polices its members for signs of such consciousness. If whites were the great obstacle to harmony, it would be they who unapologetically put their interests first, who fantasized about killing blacks, who were careful to show they were “white enough,” and ostracized those who were not. Instead, any white person who spoke or acted in ways blacks take for granted would be hounded out of public life and scorned in private.

Becoming 'color blind' isn't helpful. Who you are matters, how you are matters. Things like race and culture are a manifestation of flows of creation. Your identity doesn't just matter, without it your soul can't interact with the world. The key is we need to understand that all races, ethnic groups, cultures and like treasures are equal and we must remember to follow our soul rather than our identity. The identity is something the soul works through, not the other way around.

Being black is one of the most extreme sports in America. We don't need to invent new ways of risking our lives because the old ones have been working for decades.

Being equal does not mean being the same.

Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.” James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.” The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution. James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.” Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.