RACISM QUOTES
quotations about racism
You have to look beyond race because as a human being you have to experience the person from the inside first.
HENRIK LARSSON
"Larsson: I Was Victim of Racists in Sweden", The Mirror, October 11, 1002
I want to know
Why racism today
Was not clearly explained to me
Even though we covered events
That happened long ago.
I want to know why you
Never shared with us
Why other countries
Never liked us,
Why we are taught to compete,
To be divided in teams,
And why conformity is associated
With popularity, while
Eccentricity is considered
Undesirable?
SUZY KASSEM
Rise Up and Salute the Sun
I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being, neither white, black, brown nor red. When you are dealing with humanity as one family, there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around and with another human being.
MALCOLM X
interview, The Pierre Berton Show, January 19, 1965
There is a strange kind of tragic enigma associated with the problem of racism. No one, or almost no one, wishes to see themselves as racist; still racism persists, real and tenacious.
ALBERT MEMMI
Racism
I remember being suddenly snatched awake into a frightening confusion of pistol shots and shouting and smoke and flames. My father had shouted and shot at the two white men who had set the fire and were running away. Our home was burning down around us. We were lunging and bumping and tumbling all over each other trying to escape. My mother, with the baby in her arms, just made it into the yard before the house crashed in, showering sparks. I remember we were outside in the night in our underwear, crying and yelling our heads off. The white police and firemen came and stood around watching as the house burned down to the ground.
MALCOLM X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.
AYN RAND
The Virtue of Selfishness
Black people can't be racist. Racism is an institution. Black people don't have the power to keep hundreds of people from getting jobs or the vote. Black people didn't bring nobody over in boats. They had to add shit to the Constitution so we could get the vote. Affirmative action is about finished in this country now. It's through. And black people had nothing to do with that, those kinds of decisions. So how can black people be racist when that's the standard? Now, black people can be prejudiced. Shit, everybody's prejudiced about something.
SPIKE LEE
interview, Playboy, 1991
What would a racist call werewolves? Wargs? She kind of liked that one, but suspected that racist bastards didn't read Tolkien.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
Fair Game
Racism is something that people can transcend through friendship.
VINCENT F. ROCCHIO
Reel Racism
I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Racism is when you have laws set up, systematically put in a way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a people. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing ... then it will be done, but not until then.
SPIKE LEE
interview, 1990
Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises.
ALBERT MEMMI
Racism
Racism is an essential ingredient in the alchemy of empire, and always has been.
JUSTIN RAIMONDO
"Ferguson: Ten Days that Shook the Country", Antiwar, August 20, 2014
Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his neighbors.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Our country must abandon all the habits of racism because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.
GEORGE W. BUSH
Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 2005
At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.
JAMES BALDWIN
"A Negro Assays on the Negro Mood", New York Times, March 12, 1961
Racism rests upon and functions as a kind of seesaw: the persecutor rises by debasing and inferiorizing his victim.
ALBERT MEMMI
Racism
Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn't matter which color does the hating.
MUHAMMAD ALI
attributed, 1000 Pocket Positives
Hating skin color is contempt for God's divine creative imagination.
T. F. HODGE
From Within I Rise
I have a dream that one day ... right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
speech at Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., "I Have a Dream", August 28, 1963