Racism famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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I'm not going to sit here now and say 'do this,' or 'do that.' But you must - must - expunge any vestige of racism.
-- A. Bartlett Giamatti -
The black man continues on his way. He plods wearily no longer-he is striding freedom road with the knowledge that if he hasn't got the world in a jug, at least he has the stopper in his hand.
-- Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. -
If you see something is going wrong within politics and the world today, then some Hip Hop artist is gonna come along and get straight with it. If they think that there's a lot of racism going on then there's another Hip Hop artist who's gonna come out and speak their mind.
-- Afrika Bambaataa -
As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and inequality still saturate our society in modern ways. Though racism may be less blatant now in many cases, its existence is undeniable.
-- Al Sharpton -
Every time one of us starts talking about more effective immigration controls, somebody else throws up the Statue of Liberty, how we're a nation of immigrants and all of that. The debate takes on tinges of racism, emotion.
-- Alan K. Simpson -
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 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 -
Laundry is the only thing that should be separated by color.â€Â - - Unknown “Racism rests upon and functions as a kind of seesaw: the persecutor rises by debasing and inferiorizing his victim.
-- Albert Memmi -
I grow dizzy when I recall that the number of manufactured tanks seems to have been more important to me than the vanished victims of racism.
-- Albert Speer -
Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.
-- Alex Haley -
How grateful I am That the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints has from its beginnings stood strongly against racism in any of its malignant manifestations
-- Alexander B. Morrison -
I believe racism has killed more people than speed, heroin, or cancer, and will continue to kill until it is no more.
-- Alice Childress -
Ignorance, arrogance, and racism have bloomed as Superior Knowledge in all too many universities.
-- Alice Walker -
Racism oppresses its victims, but also binds the oppressors, who sear their consciences with more and more lies until they become prisoners of those lies. They cannot face the truth of human equality because it reveals the horror of the injustices they commit.
-- Alveda King -
Abortion and racism are evil twins, born of the same lie. Where racism now hides its face in public, abortion is accomplishing the goals of which racism only once dreamed. Together, abortionists are destroying humanity at large and the black community in particular.
-- Alveda King -
Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error.
-- Alveda King -
Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.
-- Alveda King -
One of the worst things about racism is what it does to young people.
-- Alvin Ailey -
Racism tears down your insides so that no matter what you achieve, you're not quite up to snuff.
-- Alvin Ailey -
If you live in the elite world of dance, you find yourself in a world rife with racism. Let's face it.
-- Alvin Ailey -
Racism, prejudice and discrimination are an inexplicable collective stupidity
-- Anderson Silva -
Racism has always been able to come up with a scientific veneer.
-- Andrew Hacker -
Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.
-- Andrew Johnson -
I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.
-- Andrew Young -
Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.
-- Angela Davis -
Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.
-- Angela Davis -
We have been basically persuaded that we should not talk about racism.
-- Angela Davis -
As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.
-- Angela Davis -
Feminism involves so much more than gender equality and it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve consciousness of capitalism (I mean the feminism that I relate to, and there are multiple feminisms, right). So it has to involve a consciousness of capitalism and racism and colonialism and post-colonialities, and ability and more genders than we can even imagine and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name.
-- Angela Davis -
Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and we've all been heavily sedated from it. If we don't come into consciousness of this tragedy, there's going to be a violent awakening we don't want. The question is, can we wake up?
-- Anna Deavere Smith -
Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.
-- Anna Quindlen -
Why should we think nudity is such a revolting thing in a land where there is so much violence and corruption and racism and hatred? Nudity seems like a welcome relief from all the bullshit in life.
-- Anthony Kiedis -
Non-violence can truly flourish when the world is free of poverty, hunger, discrimination, exclusion, intolerance and hatred - when women and men can realize their highest potential and live a secure and fulfilling life. Until then, each and every one of us would have to contribute - collectively and individually - to build peace through non-violence.
-- Anwarul Karim Chowdhury -
Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can.
-- Arthur Ashe -
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.
-- Ashley Montagu -
I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the U.S. government’s policy towards people of color.
-- Assata Shakur -
Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
-- Audre Lorde -
Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
-- Audre Lorde -
I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
-- Ayaan Hirsi Ali -
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.
-- Ayn Rand -
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage-the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterologic al traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.
-- Ayn Rand -
Water from the white fountain didn't taste any better than from the black fountain.
-- B. B. King -
The way we have to measure progress is not, "Is there ever going to be an incident of racism in the country?" It's, "How does the majority of our country respond?"
-- Barack Obama -
A transplanted Irishman, German, Englishman is an American in one generation. A transplanted African is not one in five!
-- Barbara Chase-Riboud -
How I wish we lived in a time when laws were not necessary to safeguard us from discrimination.
-- Barbra Streisand -
When you're wrong, you're wrong. But when you're right, you're wrong anyhow.
-- Bayard Rustin -
African Americans know about racism, but I don't think we really know the causes. I decided it's first of all a family problem.
-- Bebe Moore Campbell -
Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation?
-- Bell Hooks -
As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing.
-- Bell Hooks -
While it has become “cool†for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.
-- Bell Hooks -
When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they wish to see eradicated.
-- Bell Hooks -
..the struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism without struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression.
-- Bell Hooks -
I believe that this nation can only heal from the wounds of racism if we all begin to love blackness. And by that I don't mean that we love only that which is best within us, but that we're also able to love that which is faltering, which is wounded, which is contradictory, incomplete.
-- Bell Hooks -
Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.
-- Benjamin Spock -
It did not seem to me that prejudice, poverty, discrimination, repression and racism were confined to the North of Ireland. I could see them everywhere I spoke and still cannot comprehend the mentality that argues that I should have pretended not to see them, because it wasn't my business.
-- Bernadette Devlin -
It is important to understand that the system of advantage is perpetuated when we do not acknowledge its existence.
-- Beverly Daniel Tatum -
The social pressure from friend and acquaintance to collude, to not notice racism, can be quite powerful.
-- Beverly Daniel Tatum -
I know these dirty cops that'll get us in if we murder some Wop.
-- Big Pun -
I wasn't always black... there was this freckle, and it got bigger and bigger.
-- Bill Cosby -
I came into this whole business by going to see Rock Against Racism gigs with the Clash.
-- Billy Bragg -
Braveheart is pure Australian shiteWilliam Wallace was a spy, a thief, a blackmailer - a c**t basically. And people are swallowing it. It's part of a new Scottish racism, which I loath - this thing that everything horrible is English. It's conducted by the great unread and the conceited w***ers at the SNP, those dreary little pr**ks in Parliament who rely on bigotry for support
-- Billy Connolly -
You don't fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity.
-- Bobby Seale -
The "r" word [racism] is a scary word to me - I don't like to say it. I'm not trying to say it doesn't exist. It's incredibly inflammatory and invites a lot of awful mistakes and injustices that have happened and still do happen. It's a word that has been thrown around in a way that incites a lot of bad feelings in most people.
-- Brandi Chastain -
Racism does not diminish with brains, it's a disease, a sickness, it may incubate in ignorance but it doesn't necessarily disappear with the gaining of wisdom!
-- Bryce Courtenay -
There was funky Chinamen from funky China town.
-- Carl Douglas -
The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything.
-- Carol Moseley Braun -
The different ness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess.
-- Carter G. Woodson -
Violence and racism are bad. Whenever they occur they are to be condemned and we should not turn a blind eye to them.
-- Cate Blanchett -
You have to assess every situation that you're in and you have to decide, is this happening because I'm black? Is this happening because I'm a woman? Or is this happening because this is how it happens?
-- Charlayne Hunter-Gault -
I want to go up to the closest white person and say: 'You can't understand this, it's a black thing' and then slap him, just for my mental health.
-- Charles Barron -
I, for one, would think both about how far we have come as a country and how much further we need to go to erase racism and discrimination from our society.
-- Charles Rangel -
At times I feel it almost impossible not to despond entirely of there ever being a better, brighter day for us. None but those who experience it can know what it is - this constant, galling sense of cruel injustice and wrong. I cannot help feeling it very often, - it intrudes upon my happiest moments, and spreads a dark, deep gloom over everything.
-- Charlotte Forten Grimke -
hatred of oppression seems to me so blended with hatred of the oppressor that I cannot separate them. I feel that no other injury could be so hard to bear, so very very hard to forgive, as that inflicted by cruel oppression and prejudice.
-- Charlotte Forten Grimke -
I went to an all white school where I dealt with racism.
-- Chaske Spencer -
If one lives in a country where racism is held valid and practiced in all ways of life eventually, no matter whether one is a racist or a victim, one comes to feel the absurdity of life....Racism generated from whites is first of all absurd. Racism creates absurdity among blacks as a defense mechanism.
-- Chester Himes -
The only reason race matters is because of racism.
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
Sometimes we say we want an end to hate or racism or sexism. But we all participate in keeping these structures alive. If everyone decided to relinquish the past what would happen to people who feel that there hasn't been proper atonement made to them? And what happens to the person who feels that the constant atonement is their identity?
-- Chris Abani -
...racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.
-- Chris Crutcher -
There's a difference between racism and "I don't know any better. I'm clueless." Racism is like, "I'm trying to make you feel bad." That's racism.
-- Chris Rock -
Yeah, I love being famous. It's almost like being white, y'know?
-- Chris Rock -
What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
-- Christopher Hitchens -
Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.
-- Christopher Hitchens -
All the many brands of suppression - racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, classism - are historical; they have not been always with us. It was not ever thus. And it's not going to be this way, come the revolution!
-- Clara Fraser -
It does no service to the cause of racial equality for white people to content themselves with judging themselves to be nonracist. Few people outside the clan or skinhead movements own up to all-out racism these days. White people must take the extra step. They must become anti-racist.
-- Clarence Page -
Age-based retirement arbitrarily severs productive persons from their livelihood, squanders their talents, scars their health, strains an already overburdened Social Security system, and drives many elderly people into poverty and despair. Ageism is as odious as racism and sexism.
-- Claude Pepper -
Racism is like high blood pressure—the person who has it doesn’t know he has it until he drops over with a God damned stroke. There are no symptoms of racism. The victim of racism is in a much better position to tell you whether or not you’re a racist than you are.
-- Coleman Young -
Let it [racism] be a problem to someone else... Let it drag them down. Don't use it as an excuse for your own shortcomings.
-- Colin Powell -
The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished
-- Constance Baker Motley -
We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism
-- Constance Baker Motley -
Sexism, like racism, goes with us into the next century. I see class warfare as overshadowing both.
-- Constance Baker Motley -
I was born and raised in the oldest settled part of the nation and in an environment in which racism was officially mooted.
-- Constance Baker Motley
