365 Quotes About Race-relations

I am groping about through this American forest of prejudice and proscription, determined to find some form of civilization where all men will be accepted for what they are worth.

There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally.

I've always looked at America like a foster mother doing it only for the check. At any minute, I just knew she'd be ready to give up on me.

The tension between people is palpable, and the ideal of what it means to be and look American becomes a preoccupation to folks around the country, including me.

There ain't nothing gets a Yankee madder than a smart colored person, of which I reckon they figured there was only one in the world, Mr. Douglass.

I need little black boys to be able to belittle black boys, whole salt water galaxiesin cotton and loudness—not fixedin stunned suspension, episodes on hotasphalt, waiting in the dazzling absenceof apology.

I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody's dream of what was right with the world.

The question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That’s what segregation means. You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall, because you don’t want to know.

From the onset, reformist white women with class privilege were well aware that the power and freedom they wanted was the freedom they perceived men of their class enjoying.