quotations about racism
Racism has been an integral component of American culture since its founding upon the genocide of Native Americans, and the forced slavery of Africans and Afro-Americans.
VINCENT F. ROCCHIO
Reel Racism
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage--the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
AYN RAND
The Virtue of Selfishness
The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Hitch-22: A Memoir
It was obvious that bigotry was never a one-way operation, that hatred bred hatred.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Pebble in the Sky
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Consistent with Martin Luther King's vision, the government should stop color-coding its citizens.
DINESH D'SOUZA
"As I See It", Forbes, December 2, 1996
In the beginning--and neither can this be overstated--a Negro just cannot believe that white people are treating him as they do; he does not know what he has done to merit it. And when he realizes that the treatment accorded him has nothing to do with anything he has done, that the attempt of white people to destroy him--for that is what it is--is utterly gratuitous, it is not hard for him to think of white people as devils.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time
Racism has never done this country any good, and it needs to be fought against, not put under new management for different groups.
THOMAS SOWELL
"Out of Context", Jewish World Review, June 2, 2009
Racism is a universal phenomenon that exists across cultures and tends to emerge wherever ethnic diversity and perceived or real differences in group characteristics become part of a struggle for social power.
JERRY V. DILLER
Cultural Diversity: A Primer for the Human Services
Black people are pretty much the same as white people; they just tend to be a little bit darker.
TOM CLANCY
"In Depth with Tom Clancy", C-SPAN, February 3, 2002
It would be a great mistake to look upon racism as an irrational doctrine: racism is not a doctrine of irrationalism, it is the very surging up of irrationalism as an elemental force, getting rid of all doctrine, truth and rational structure.
JACQUES MARITAIN
The Twilight of Civilization
Racism is a group dynamic. The members of the dominating group participate, contribute, receive financial rewards, benefits, privileges, and status from the maintenance of a false belief and assumption of racial superiority that gives them the right to rule over other human beings. This participation and reception of benefits can be direct or indirect, willing or unwilling, voluntary or involuntary. Even though an individual in the dominate group may or may not express an opposing opinion, the fact that the effect of the dominating groups' action demeans, belittles, dehumanizes, and exploits other human beings makes them participants in the system. Therefore, any individual who is a member of the dominating group can be called a racist.
KENNETH L. RADCLIFFE
Applying Alcoholics Anonymous Principles to the Disease of Racism
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic admiration.
MAYA ANGELOU
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Until the philosophy which holds one race
Superior and another inferior
Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned
Everything is war, me say war
BOB MARLEY
"War", Rastaman Vibration
Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.
OPRAH WINFREY
attributed, I Dream a World
Whatever their intentions ... eighteenth-century ethnologists opened the way to a secular or scientific racism by considering human beings part of the animal kingdom rather than by viewing them in biblical terms as children of God endowed with spiritual capacities denied to other creatures.
GEORGE M. FREDRICKSON
Racism: A Short History
Race in itself means nothing--the markers of race, skin color, hair texture, the things that we identify as the racial markers, mean nothing unless they are given social meaning and unless there's public policy and private actions that act upon those kinds of characteristics. That creates race.
MELVIN OLIVER
"Episode Three: The House We Live In", Race: The Power of an Illusion
A vision of cultural homogeneity that seeks to deflect attention away from or even excuse the oppressive, dehumanizing impact of white supremacy on the lives of black people by suggesting black people are racist too indicates that the culture remains ignorant of what racism really is and how it works. It shows that people are in denial. Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation?
BELL HOOKS
Killing Rage: Ending Racism
What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?
JONATHAN LETHEM
The Fortress of Solitude
Racism is a word which describes one of the results--perhaps the principal result--of our estrangement from our beginnings, from the universal source.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head