365 Quotes About Race-relations

But the way you talk, fun is first and foremost. You imply that there is no fun to be had around white folks." "I never had none," said Simple.

I want so little: another leather boundBook, a gimlet with a lavender gin, breadSo good when I taste it I can tell youHow it’s made. I’d like us to rethinkWhat it is to be a nation. I’m in a mood about AmericaToday.

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.

Our problem is not a predetermined clash of irreconcilable genomes. Racism is generated and empowered by a flawed worldview that can be corrected with scientific and historical knowledge.”-SKEPTIC MAGAZINE volume 25 number 3 2020

White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies.

Today, as in colonial Virginia, the wealthy and powerful maintain an unequal society with the complicity of white people who share color with them but class with almost everybody else.... Though my view of Bacon's Rebellion has changed over the years, I keep coming back to it. There's something vexingly American in the story, in the violence and in the hope--and in the lengths that the powerful will go to try to stop the most natural yearnings of all, for human connection and for freedom.

Nobody asked the Negro what he thunk about the whole business, by the way, nor the Indian, when I think of it, for neither of their thoughts didn't count, even through most of the squabbling was about them on the outside, for at bottom the whole business was about land and money, something nobody who was squabbling seemed to ever get enough of.

White wasn't better, it turned out, or smarter. Just richer. Still richer. Always richer.