365 Quotes About Race-relations

Perhaps it now occurs to him that in this need to establish himself in his relation to his past [the African American] is most American, that this depthless alienation from oneself and one's people is, in sum, the American experience.

And this is the dwarfing, warping, distorting influence which operates upon each and every colored man in the United States. He is forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the viewpoint of a citizen, or a man, or even a human being, but from the viewpoint of a colored man. It is wonderful to me that the race has progressed so broadly as it has, since most of its thought and all of its activity must run through the narrow neck of this one funnel.

This country is a land mass that could be called anything, and for people to act like this is some kind of sacred territory is an insanity. It's just a bunch of people trying to live together, and if we're not going to be part of a dream of equality--a part of a dream of that which is the best of us, the idea that people help one another--if we're not going to do that, then this land mass doesn't any more deserve to be revered than anything else.

Getting history right is pretty much the most important thing a citizen can do in a nation at war with itself--as ours was. And is.

It is interesting that a guy like W.E.B. Du Bois, who actually did very little, I should imagine, with his hands, wrote about "I am the smoke king." Without the labor, both free and slave, of African Americans this country would still be a wilderness.

Discrimination does not 'make America great.' It makes America weak.

When the Lakota chief Red Cloud finally quit fighting the intruders, he reportedly told a white delegation, "We didn't need all this land, and neither did you.

We do not admire their president.We know why the White House is white.We do not find their children irresistible;We do not agree they should inherit the earth.

To be black in America is a wild and endless assault on the senses. You can spend every day fighting off your spiritual and intellectual extinction.