163 Quotes About Race-and-racism-in-america

One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes are super cool.

Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.

Our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body, it must somehow be your fault. Trayvon Martin’s hoodie got him killed. Jordan Davis’s loud music did the same.

To be fair, I hate the N-word and avoid using it because the N-word has always been a pejorative, a word designed to remind black people of their place, a word to reinforce a perception of inferiority. I have no interest in using the word to describe myself or any person of color, under any circumstance. There is no reclamation to be had.

Long ago, before I met her, she twisted her blond hair into dreadlocks and, pretty as she is, the locks add an allure she wouldn't otherwise have.

Had she been able to think, Jean Louise might have prevented events to come by considering the day's occurrences in terms of a recurring story as old as time: the chapter which concerned her began two hundred years ago and was played out in a proud society the bloodiest war and harshest peace in modern history could not destroy, returning, to be played out again on private ground in the twilight of civilization no wars and no peace could save.

And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.

...but if the Negro is so distinctly inferior, it is a strange thing to me that it takes such tremendous effort on the part of the white man to make him realize it, and to keep him in the same place into which inferior men naturally fall.