Racism Quotes, Quotations and Sayings
Racism is man’s gravest threat to man – the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats.
Woody Allen
One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.
Franklin Thomas
If a white man falls off a chair drunk, it’s just a drunk. If a Negro does, it’s the whole damn Negro race.
Bill Cosby
I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality…. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
Martin Luther King
Jim Bakker spells his name with 2 k’s because 3 would be too obvious.
Bill Maher
Racism isn’t born, folks, it’s taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list.
Dennis Leary
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow. Better even to die free than to live slaves.
Frederick Douglass
But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?
Robert F. Kennedy
I swear to the Lord
I still can’t see
Why Democracy means
Everybody but me.
Langston Hughes
Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.
Desmond Tutu
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it.
Joseph Conrad
I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.
Muhammad Ali
The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it – whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.
Harper Lee
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
Bertrand Russell
I am working for the time when unqualified blacks, browns, and women join the unqualified men in running our government.
Cissy Farenthold
Laundry is the only thing that should be separated by color.
People are asking me about the race problem…. I know of no race problem. The great problem that confronts the American people to-day is a national problem — whether this great nation of ours is great enough to live up to its own convictions, carry out its own declaration of independence, and execute the provisions of its own constitution. (1893)
Frederick Douglass
In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.
Harry A. Blackmun
I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
Barack Obama
To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
William Faulkner
This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour in which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.
Gloria Steinem
Racial superiority is a mere pigment of the imagination.
Accomplishments have no color.
Leontyne Price
If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won’t either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.
Marian Wright Edelman
The African race is a rubber ball. The harder you dash it to the ground, the higher it will rise.
African Proverb
I am where I am because of the bridges that I crossed. Sojourner Truth was a bridge. Harriet Tubman was a bridge. Ida B. Wells was a bridge. Madame C. J. Walker was a bridge. Fannie Lou Hamer was a bridge.
Oprah Winfrey
A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family.
Saul Alinsky
Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Barack could run, Barack ran so we all can fly.
I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream — a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man’s skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.
Martin Luther King
Racism is man’s gravest threat to man – the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
Abraham J. Heschel
When we’re unemployed, we’re called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it’s called a depression.
Jesse Jackson
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu walked by a construction site on a temporary sidewalk the width of one person. A white man appeared at the other end, recognized Tutu, and said, “I don’t make way for gorillas.” At which Tutu stepped aside, made a deep sweeping gesture, and said, “Ah, yes, but I do.”
Walter Wink
My generation’s apathy. I’m disgusted with it. I’m disgusted with my own apathy too, for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism and all those other -isms the counterculture has been whinning about for years.
Kurt Cobain
In world history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture.
Ruth Fulton Benedict