Best 4508 quotes in «race quotes» category

Hey you — All our fevered history won't instill insight, won't turn a body conscious, won't make that look in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing to solve even as each moment is an answer.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace.

High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of new continents, though we might ourselves have behaved atrociously to indigenes, were baffled by the determination with which Europe returned to the frenzies of racial myth. Nice boys and not-so-nice boys took up the theme, put on the uniform, did the dirty work.

History is a delicate matter in a diverse country. Shortly after the fall of the Alamo—likewise in 1836—Mexican troops defeated the Texans at the Battle of Coleto Creek near Goliad, Texas. The Texans surrendered, believing they would be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, the Mexicans marched the 300 or so survivors to Goliad and shot them in what became known as the Goliad Massacre. Mexicans resent the term “massacre.” With the city of Goliad now half Hispanic, they insist on “execution.” Many Anglos, said Benny Martinez of the Goliad chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), “still hate Mexicans and using ‘massacre’ is a subtle way for them to express it.” Watertown, Massachusetts, had a different disagreement about history. In 2007, the town’s more than 8,000 Armenian-Americans were so angry at the Anti-Defamation League’s refusal to recognize the World War I Turkish massacres of Armenians as genocide that they persuaded the city council to cut ties with the ADL’s “No Place For Hate” program designed to fight discrimination. Other towns with a strong Armenian presence—Newton, Belmont, Somerville, and Arlington—were considering breaking with the ADL. Filmmaker Ken Burns has learned that diversity complicates history. When he made a documentary on the Second World War, Latino groups complained it did not include enough Hispanics—even though none had seen it. Mr. Burns bristled at the idea of changing his film, but Hispanics put enough pressure on the Public Broadcasting Service to force him to. Even prehistory is divisive. In 1996, two men walking along the Columbia River in Washington State discovered a skeleton that was found to be 9,200 years old. “Kennewick Man,” as the bones came to be called, was one of the oldest nearly complete human skeletons ever uncovered in North America and was of great interest to scientists because his features were more Caucasian than American Indian. Local Indians claimed he was an ancestor and insisted on reburying him. It took more than eight years of legal battles before scientists got full access to the remains.

...hopelessness can create an atmosphere where fixable problems become unfixable ones. We must work to resist this erosion in our belief in the potential of our own behavior and actions to change things.

However, if you fail to prepare, you will either go through stress to win your race or you may quit when the battle becomes tougher than you ever imagined.

How stupid she had been ever to have thought that she could marry and perhaps have children in a land where every dark child was handicapped at the start by the shroud of color! She saw, suddenly, the giving birth to little, helpless, unprotesting Negro children as a sin, an unforgivable outrage. More black folk to suffer indignities. More dark bodies for mobs to lynch.

HUMANITY DOES NOT FAVOUR ANY HUMAN BEING OVER ANOTHER, FOR RACE, RELIGION, SEXUALITY, AGE OR GENDER... JUST LIKE A LOVING MOTHER WHO DOES NOT FAVOUR ONE CHILD OVER ANOTHER.

I am groping about through this American forest of prejudice and proscription, determined to find some form of civilization where all men will be accepted for what they are worth.

Holocaust survivors and their descendants are supposed to hate those who oppressed and killed them and their people. Black people are not. This is how anti-blackness works.

Hospitals cannot continue to hemorrhage. For the country as a whole, medical insurance premiums include a surcharge that pays for treating the uninsured. However, if the proportion of uninsured indigent patients exceeds a certain figure, a hospital has no choice but to close. In California alone, the heavy cost of free medicine for foreigners forced no fewer than 60 hospitals to shut down between 1993 and 2003; many others were on the verge of collapse. From 1994 to 2004, the number of hospital emergency rooms in the country as a whole dropped by more than 12 percent. In May 2010, Miami’s health care system was so strapped, it was considering closing two of its five public hospitals. This would mean laying off 4,487 employees and the loss of 581 acute-care beds. Experts explained that treating uninsured patients had stretched the system to the breaking point. Houston is a good example of a city whose hospitals are barely making ends meet. In the nation as a whole, about 15 percent of the population has no medical insurance, but Texas, with its large population of Hispanics, has the highest percentage at 24 percent. In Houston, the figure is 30 percent. The safety net cannot accommodate so many people who cannot pay. “Does this mean rationing?” asks Kenenth Mattox, chief of staff at Ben Taub General Hospital. “You bet it does.” There is such a crush at Houston’s emergency rooms that ambulances often wait for one or two hours before they can even unload patients. The record wait is six hours. Twenty percent of the time, hospitals end up sending patients to other hospitals, and some have died after being diverted. Politicians and businessmen pull strings so friends can cut in line. Americans who fall sick in Mexico do not get free treatment. The State Department warns that Mexican doctors routinely refuse to treat foreign patients unless paid in advance, and that they often charge Americans for services not rendered.

How can men boast that they control their own destiny when they cannot solve the problems of war, racism, poverty, sickness, or suffering?

How do you know if someone loves herself? No hairstyle, religion, or ethnicity has ownership of self-love or a greater propensity toward self-hatred. The best way to tell if a woman loves herself is by how she treats herself and others. She makes self-loving choices.

How's that training coming along, Griff? Good old Max says you're a natural." Turner frowned. Any time a white man asked you about yourself, they were about to fuck you over.

Humanitarian concerns are always dismissed as impractical, at least initially. Humanitarian concerns, however, aren’t high on the national gay movement’s list of priorities; if they were, we’d hear a lot more from them than we do about the inequities that derive from race, class, and gender.

Humanity it's strange race, if I can say this. There a lot of secrets and stuff which are still mysteries for this race! I know that most people are like the characters the guy near GreenWind, GreenHollyWood, the people like DeYtH are rare. GreenHollywood blocked me on skype because what??? Can't understand a joke, so he can joke with me but I can't??? WOW! Just Humanity or most people just stop us from doing the stuff which will make us better.

I always root for the black man, like penance for something I had not part in creating.

I am an African. I am white. I, in my humble way, and others in their much more brave way, have earned that right.

I am living in world full of lost hope and discrimination. I am living a life in which social equality does not exist and I am not sure that it ever can, or if once upon a time it ever did.

I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury with all your wide futures promised I am woman and not white.

I am usually able to tolerate all kinds of victims of indoctrination except those who have been infected with xenophobia, racism, or homophobia.

I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them.

I became a chameleon. My color didn't change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn't look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.

I became a chameleon. My color didn't change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke to me in Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn't look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.

I believe White Folk persecute Black Folk are publicly, because in their hearts they build alters and sing praises and make sacrifices; they do it all to us. We are admired, and adored, we are coveted for our fleshy part from where our hair ends to where the earth beneath us starts they want everything about this blackness but the burden; that we can keep.

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.

I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilisation. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now - in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life - expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse.

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.

I can't understand why dark northern soldiers and light ones are seperated into different brigades. The dead are all buried together in hasty mass graves, bones touching.

I didn't want to be the kind of privileged person who tells oppressed people what their version of diversity should look like.

I didn’t want to argue with my hosts. I wanted them to talk. But I felt like reminding Li that perhaps forty million Chinese people had died of starvation a half century earlier because they followed their government’s orders. It was the largest famine in history. A snapshot taken then would have given a very different picture of the supposedly essential character of Chinese people, and it would have entirely missed the point. Governments matter. Markets matter. History matters. International circumstances matter.

I do not believe we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. 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. The Dream is the same habit that endangers this planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.

I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing!

I don't expect everyone to feel the same way that I do about land. For so many of us, the scars are still too fresh. Fields of cotton stretching to the horizon - land worked, sweated, and suffered over for the profit of others - probably don't engender warm feelings among most black people. But the land, in spite of its history, still holds hope for making good on the promises we thought it could, especially if we can reconnect to it. The reparations lie not in what someone will give us, but in what we already own. The land can grow crops for us as well as it does for others. It can yield loblolly pine and white oak for us as it has for others. And it can nurture wildlife and the spirit for us, just like it has for others.

I don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain.

I don’t know whether Asimov realized he was saying this as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever look at you, read a word you write, or consider you in any situation, no matter whether the roof is falling in or the money is pouring in, without saying to him- or herself (whether in an attempt to count it or to discount it), 'Negro...' The racial situation, permeable as it might sometimes seem (and it is, yes, highly permeable), is nevertheless your total surround. Don’t you ever forget it...! And I never have.

I don’t subscribe to the notion of seeing no color, that we’re all the same and race doesn’t exist. It’s a social and political reality that we live in. The problem when people say we should concentrate on similarities is that they’re ignoring glaring parts of our humanness—our skin, perhaps the color of our hair, the way we speak, or even the shape of our eyes.

I don’t think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

I don’t think anyone deserves to rot in jail the rest of their lives for stealing a pack of cigarettes. The court systems will be no kinder to these people than police have been, and both are avid practitioners of a convenient morality that consigns millions of black Americans to poverty with its selective policies, then persecutes those same black Americans at a disproportionate rate (almost a rate of 1:5) for the same (often nonviolent) crimes, openly regards black Americans with brutality (often killing people in cold blood for no reason other than that they ‘look like’ the grainy photos of 'suspects' I report), and then condemns millions of black Americans, each year, to lives in prison- too often for nothing more than the crime of stealing a pack of cigarettes.

I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don't wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all the negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The same onus is not on me to change. Instead it's the world around me..

I don't care about any theory or any philosophy or any of that shit! Blackness is visible! The idea that someone can be black, but not look black is ridiculous! White passing and all that other nonsense about being racially ambiguous but still Black is a god damned lie! The one drop rule is a lie!

If California is the future of the United States, Los Angeles may offer a lesson. In 1960, it was 72 percent white, but in just ten years that figure dropped to 59 percent, and by 2000 the city was only 33 percent white. During the 1980s, while every other racial group was gaining in numbers, Los Angeles County lost 330,000 whites, and a startling 570,000 during the 1990s. Where did they go? Beginning in the 1980s, California saw a major shift of whites from southern, immigrant-heavy regions to the white north. Many moved to Nevada County, which Mel Mouser, the police chief of the town of Grass Valley, called 'the largest concentration of Caucasians in the state of California.' In the 15 years ending in 1995, the county's population grew by no less than 65 percent and remained 93 percent white. The newcomers were looking for the kind of homogeneity they grew up with but had lost to immigrants. As Chief Mouser explained, the newcomers 'bring with them the common strain of thought: Don't let it be like where I came from.' Although Americans have learned to give non-racial reasons like 'crime' or 'bad schools' for leaving cities, many ex-Los Angelenos were candid about what drove them away. As one 1990s transplant explained, 'People come here for a timeout, to go some place where racial problems don't exist. [...] And when they find it here, they're pathetically grateful. They want to protect it.' Another explained: 'I'd look at my daughter's classroom and see two blondes. [...] It seemed like there was more of everything else but whites.

I DREAM OF A CHARCOAL CHALKY AFRICA I am as black as charcoal But that is only my skin color I don’t need to see hacked white bodies To know that we are the same on the inside I feel the same anguish and disgust for the innocent Murdered black South Africans during apartheid Murdered white South Africans post-apartheid We 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 blacks I challenge you to search online now Google ‘South African farm murders’ And see if you can look at the gruesome pictures Of innocent children, women and men Do 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 long But must we repeat that mistake with post-apartheid massacres? Some of these murdered whites fought against apartheid These murdered children didn’t even know about apartheid Don’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 protected Killing these innocent people is not justice It is inhuman; it is cowardice Don’t look away and don’t hold back the tears It is not only a cry for white victims It is not only a cry for black victims It is a cry for a better South Africa A cry for a richer, charcoal, chalky Africa

If not as a true human, let me tell you as a Biologist, color of the skin does not define an individual’s intelligence – it does not define an individual’s ambitions - it does not define an individual’s dreams – and above all, it does not define an individual’s character.

If I can't forgive birth mother, how can I be out in the world arguing for love, justice, and community? How can I hold her hostage away from my heart for something she did when she was so young? My instincts are to stay angry, but my heart says that anger is the road to ruin.

If feminism can understand the patriarchy, it's important to question why so many feminists struggle to understand whiteness as a political structure in the very same way.

If my mother's intention in whole or in part was to ensure that I never had to suffer any indignity or embarrassment for being a Jew, then she succeeded well enough. And in any case there were enough intermarriages and 'conversions' on both sides of her line to make me one of those many mischling hybrids who are to be found distributed all over the known world. And, as someone who doesn't really believe that the human species is subdivided by 'race,' let alone that a nation or nationality can be defined by its religion, why should I not let the whole question slide away from me? Why—and then I'll stop asking rhetorical questions—did I at some point resolve that, in whatever tone of voice I was asked 'Are you a Jew?' I would never hear myself deny it?

If origin defines race, then the entire human race is African.

If origin defines race, then we are all Africans – we are all black.

If no one takes a stand, a stand won't be taken.