365 Quotes About Race-relations

Ah, if he had ever been a slave he would have known how difficult it was to trust a white man.

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

Becoming conscious of racism does not mean you are a racist.

I was learning that just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.

Intermarriage is one of the most provocative words in the English language

As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise---and inexplicably---to be envied.

It seems that wherever the Black body is present, whether in solitary or a multitude, whites feel threatened, perhaps by the ghosts of their own sins for which they have never atoned.

Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)