Racism In America Quotes

“Science says the races are biologically equal so if they're not in society, the only reason why can be racism.”
― Jason Reynolds, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

“The day Stamp Paid saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Baldwin's words can sound harsh, as if he's throwing away millions of Americans and declaring them irrelevant to the life and future of our democracy. It's easy to read him that way, and sometimes, when his rage boils, he might actually mean it. But in the end, he wanted us to see that whiteness as an identity was a moral choice, an attitude toward the world based on ugly things. People can, if they want to, choose to be better. We need only build a world where that choice can be made with relative ease. If we--and I mean all of us who are committed to a New America--organize and fight with every ounce of energy we have to found an America free from the categories that bind our feet, implement policies that remedy generations-old injustices, and demonstrate in our living and political arrangements the value that every human being is sacred, we can build a New Jerusalem where the value gap [between whites and people of color] cannot breathe.”
― Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

“History hurt more than any weapon inflicted on us. It hit back harder than any weapon we could wield, any weapon we could turn ourselves into.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“Reggie Atkinson: Oh God. Oh God. I went to war with the Nazis... and for 25 years, all I've been scared of is Americans.”
― Garth Ennis, Dreaming Eagles

“Black Diamonds

Black gemstones pillaged from Mother Earth and mined from Kemet,
Crystallized into rare gems under
centuries of pressure.
Yet, clarity remains pure under the
brutal heat of history
And the alluvial mining along the
coastlines of black beaches.
Whitewashing while extracting Nubian gems from sable sands,
Twelve million carats separated from
the soil of black lands.”
― D.B. Mays, Black Lives, Lines, and Lyrics

“American Soup"

We've taken the lid off,
the pot is boiling over.
Watch yourself, don't touch it
lest you burn and bear the scars
of that good ole American melting pot
that’s cracking under the weight of its faux democracy.”
― D.B. Mays, Black Lives, Lines, and Lyrics

“But if we are ever to gain a clearer sense of who we’ve been, and thus who we are as white Americans, we are going to need to revise the story.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Of course it all rests on the unshakable belief that the men and women Forest bought and sold into enslavement were subhuman. But many in America have held and hold such beliefs. We know about Forest, specifically, because he was born poor on the frontier and availed himself of the opportunities to advance in the country and an economy built on the backs of others. You might say he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but those bootstraps were other human beings.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Segregationists are haters. Like, real haters. People who hate you for not being like them. Assimilationists are people who like you, but only with quotation marks. Like... 'like' you. Meaning, they 'like' you because you're like them. And then there are antiracists. They love you because you're like you.”
― Jason Reynolds, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

“But it's important to note, life can rarely be wrapped into single-word descriptions. It isn't neat and perfectly shaped. So sometimes, over the course of a lifetime (and even over the course of a day), people can take on and act out ideas represented by more than one of these three identities. Can be both, and. Just keep that in mind as we explore these folks.”
― Jason Reynolds, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

“In the days after Donald Trump’s victory, there would be an insistence that something as “simple” as racism could not explain it. As if enslavement had nothing to do with global economics, or as if lynchings said nothing about the idea of women as property. As though the past 400 years could be reduced to the irrational resentment of full lips. No. Racism is never simple. And there was nothing simple about what was coming, or about Obama, the man who had unwittingly summoned this future into being.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“Colored kids don't get to be innocent. It's like you come out of the womb full grown, the way the world treats you.”
― Daven McQueen, The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones

“In that way, they [monuments] are a reflection of the times in which they are erected as much as they are a reflection of the times they seek to commemorate. You can think of them, Alderman went on, as monuments to the power of the people who erect them, rather than as solely of the person depicted.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Growing up in the North had fostered in me a sense that I was somehow exempt from the legacy of the Civil War and, for that matter, the racial madness of the country”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Granted, to approach this history with the binary framework provided by the Civil War can make for a simplistic morality play. One in which it's all too easy and too obvious for a Yankee to traipse into a Southern cemetery and clutch his Northern pearls. Robert Penn Warren called this instinct the "treasury of virtue" - the white Northern's feeling that, by dint of our affiliation with the Union, the great, emancipating army, well, then we were (and remained) morally upstanding, unimpeachably good. It was a feeling that could render us "happy in forgetfulness," the Civil War like an event horizon beyond which our own pasts vanish”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Northerners were distanced from the violence, from the inhumanity of the practice [of slavery], but were implicated all the same”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“I do think that there is a need for folks who are not of African descent but who have in any way, shape, or form benefited not only from slavery but from systemic racism that has survived beyond slavery, to be able to acknowledge that," she explained. But not by taking blame for the actions of an ancestor; it's not about blame-placing it or taking it. Instead, Wells said, the idea is to see past an individual's feelings or actions to the systems built to protect the privilege and fortune amassed by some through the deprivation of others. We have to recognize the injury and care about those who have been harmed, she said, then we have to see the systems that produce and perpetuate those injuries. And to do that, we need to use our sense of the past to hone our awareness of the present”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“On one side of the tracks was the commercial center: the college, city hall, businesses, white residential neighborhoods-carefully kept that way, first by deliberate redlining and later by Jim Crow... Through the sixties, the city of Commerce was known as a "sundown town"- any Black person found of the streets after dark was in danger of being lynched. The only place where Black citizens were safe from the threat of white violence was also the only place Black people were legally allowed to reside: Norris Community, known fondly by younger generations as "the Hole".”
― Brittany K. Barnett, A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom

“A statue of a lone Confederate general towers over the Clarksville town center. To hear my grandpa tell it the general was built looking sternly over the Black side of town as a warning regarding where the town's heart lies. As if there were any question.”
― Brittany K. Barnett, A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom

“Racial injustice is America’s original sin and deepest silence.”
― Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

“Without the voices from the edges publicly demanding, wailing, and protesting, institutions and systems that engage in exclusionary, oppressive, or marginalizing practices continue to operate with apathy or impunity. Destructive systems do not change themselves, and those working for change within these systems can’t do it alone.”
― Bruce Reyes-Chow, In Defense of Kindness: Why It Matters, How It Changes Our Lives, and How It Can Save the World

“The reality is that racial lynchings were a frequent and normal feature of life in the South. This unique method of murder was a devastating form of terrorism that imposed a constant threat to all black people. The white authority structure did not only tolerate or encourage these killings but used the fear of lynchings to control and oppress black people.”


--“Why White America Must Learn the History of Lynching”, Skeptical Inquirer (December 2020)”
― Guy P. Harrison

“Lynchings in the past have significantly shaped race relations in the present. A killing such as George Floyd’s lands on black people with a much heavier psychological weight because of lynching’s legacy. Too many white people fail to recognize this, and that needs to change. The hurt is too great, the simmering fear and anger too volatile, to bury forever. All Americans who would seek or demand a nation that is fairer to every citizen, less racist, and more peaceful have a responsibility to know this history in detail. … Confronting this ugliness would be difficult for everyone, of course, but it should be attempted. Ignorance and denial certainly have not worked, because this American wound still bleeds.”

-- “Why White America Must Learn the History of Lynching”, Skeptical Inquirer (December 2020)”
― Guy P. Harrison

“Slavery was no accident.
We didn't trip and fall into black subjugation.
Racism wasn't a bad joke that just never went away.
It was all on purpose.
Every bit of it was on purpose.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“I don't know what to do with what I've learned," she said. "I can't fix your pain and I can't take it away, but I can see it. And I can work for the rest of my life to make sure your children don't have to experience the pain of racism." And then she said nine words that I've never forgotten: "Doing nothing is no longer an option to me.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“It took centuries for America to hone its instruments of oppression. Every time part of it fell, it simply re-emerged in a more elegant form. Battling racism in this country is like cutting heads off the Hydra.”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“Progress is the wall behind which white America hides. (Even many Black leaders have absorbed and regurgitate the progress narrative.) White liberals expect Black people to applaud their efforts. But how is that a fair and legitimate expectation? Slavery, white supremacy, and racism are horrid, man-made constructs that should never have existed in the first place. Are we meant to cheer the slow, creeping, centuries-long undoing of a thing that never should have been done?”
― Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

“We still tiptoe around having an honest discussion about what it really means to exist while Black in this country. All lives can’t matter if Black lives don’t matter. Demanding equality and equity isn’t radicalism. This is realism. We make these demands because the Constitution isn’t an accurate reflection of Black life in this country. If liberty escapes few, it escapes all.”
― D.B. Mays, Black Lives, Lines, and Lyrics

“The Run"

It’s the middle of the day, I know some are home,

and they see and hear the wrong that’s going on.

A Black man is being hunted on their street,

That’s why no one calls in help for me.


I hear the shots, three times I’m struck.

I try and try, but I can’t get up.

My head is lifted toward the sky,

No pain, I’m riding the runner’s high.”
― D.B. Mays, Black Lives, Lines, and Lyrics