race Quotes

“She pulled it out of the way and started to say sorry—but it was that stupid Asian kid, and he frowned when he saw that it was her.”

“Without power for the group, a group larger, even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind.”

“The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”

“To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”

“My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there.”

“I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”

“Our problem as Americans -- at least, among my race and gender -- is that we resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives.”

“Mama: Oh—So now it’s life. Money is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life—now it’s money. I guess the world really do change . . . Walter: No—it was always money, Mama. We just didn’t know about it. Mama: No . . . something has changed. You something new, boy. In my time we was worried about not being lynched . . . You ain’t satisfied or proud of nothing we done. I mean that you had a home; that we kept you out of trouble till you was grown; that you don’t have to ride to work on the back of nobody’s streetcar—You my children—but how different we done become.”

“Mama: Them houses they put up for colored in them areas way out all seem to cost twice as much as other houses. I did the best I could.”

“Asagai: …You came up to me and you said… “Mr. Asagai—I want very much to talk with you. About Africa. You see, Mr. Asagai, I am looking for my identity! (He laughs).”

“We all black and white and everything else—this isn’t a race thing. There’s two sides to the story, and that’s what we want to bring out. Nothing about my mother is truth if it’s about wantin to fry the researchers. It’s not about punish the doctors or slander the hospital. I don’t want that.”

“Lindner: …most of the trouble exists because people just don’t sit down and talk to each other…That we don’t try hard enough in this world to understand the other fellow’s problem. The other guy’s point of view.”

“In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race-mixing proves that races can mix—and in a lot of cases, want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race-mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.”

“That, and so many other smaller incidents in my life, made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”

“As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with ‘race.’ I didn’t know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So when the other kids in Soweto called me ‘white,’ even though I was light brown, I just thought they had their colors mixed up, like they hadn’t learned them properly. ‘Ah, yes, my friend. You’ve confused aqua with turquoise. I can see how you made that mistake. You’re not the first.’”

“I wonder if the quiet was not better than … death and hatred. But … I will not wonder long.”

“That is just what is wrong with the colored woman in this world … Don’t understand about building their men up and making ‘em feel like they somebody. Like they can do something.”

“My day has been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of the Unarms happy and strong; and yet, before the sun has come, have I lived to see the last warrior of the wise race of the Mohicans.”

“Son — I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers – but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay ‘em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth. We ain’t never been that poor. We ain’t never been that — dead inside.”

“Big Walter used to say, he’d get right wet in the eyes sometimes, lean his head back with the water standing in his eyes and say, ‘Seem like God didn’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worth while.”

“Tell them, that the Being we all worship, under different names, will be mindful of their charity; and that the time shall not be distant, when we may assemble around his throne, without distinction of sex, or rank, or color!”

“So many black families spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past. That is the curse of being black and poor, and it is a curse that follows you from generation to generation. My mother calls it ‘the black tax.’ Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up to zero.”

“And by the time he met Big Mike, he had a new unofficial title: Life Guidance Counselor to whatever black athlete stumbled into the Briarcrest Christian School. The black kids reminded him, in a funny way, of himself. Sean knew what it meant to be the poor kid in a private school, because he’d been one himself.”

“When the Ole Miss defense gathered in a single room, the only white people were coaches. On the football field the players became honorary white people, but off it they were still black, and unnatural combatants in Mississippi’s white internecine war.”

“This little man, five-foot-nine at most and not even American, was going to teach them about cowboys?”

″ Twelve white men say a black man must die, and another white man sets the date and time without consulting one black person. Justice? ”

“Maybe at birth everyone should be given to a family of a different race to be raised. Maybe that would solve racism once and for all.”

“But . . . you born with two strikes on you before you come to the plate. You got to guard it closely . . . always looking for the curve-ball on the inside corner. You can’t afford to let none get past you. You can’t afford a call strike. If you going down . . . you going down swinging.”

“Got up here and found out . . . not only couldn’t you get a job . . . you couldn’t find no place to live. I thought I was in freedom. Shhh. Colored folks living down there on the riverbanks in whatever kind of shelter they could find for themselves.”

“The colored guy got to be twice as good before he get on the team. That’s why I don’t want you to get all tied up in them sports. Man on the team and what it get him? They got colored on the team and don’t use them. Same as not having them. All them teams the same.”

“Love comes in every color—and if a person finds love and that person is of a different race from him or her, it shouldn’t matter because the two of them found love.”

“I thought it would be easier if we were just one color, black or white. I didn’t want to be white. My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds.”

“The question of race was like the power of the moon in my house. It’s what made the river flow, the ocean swell, and the tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable, and thus completely ignorable. Mommy kept us at a frantic living pace that left no time for the problem.”

“You know, my whole life changed after I fell in love. It was like the sun started shining on me for the first time, and for the first time in my life I began to smile. I was loved, I was loved, and I didn’t care what anyone thought. I wasn’t worried about getting caught, but I did notice that Peter’s friends were terrified of me; they stayed clear anytime I came near them. They’d walk away from me if they saw me walking down the road coming toward them, and if they came into the store, they wouldn’t even look at me. That started to worry me a little but I didn’t worry much.”

“But silence, do you hear me? Silence upon the whole subject; and let no one get before us in this design of discovering the center of the earth.”

“Every time I get to thinking about me being black and they being white, me being here and they being there, I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me. ”

“He stood with her body in his arms in the silent room and cold facts battered him like waves sweeping in from the sea: she was dead; she was white; she was a woman; he had killed her; he was black; he might be caught; he did not want to be caught; if he were they would kill him. ”

“As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.”

“Some of the American whites, moreover, are just as far behind in this respect as are the Negroes who have had less opportunity to learn better.”

″ African-Americans themselves in certain parts join with Euro-Americans, to keep out of school, teachers who may be bold enough to teach the truth as it is. They usually say the races here are getting along amicably now, and we do not want these peaceful relationships disturbed by teaching of new political thought. What they mean to say with respect to the peaceful relation of the races, then, is that the African-Americans have been terrorized to the extent that they are afraid even to discuss political matters publicly.”

“It has been said that the Negroes do not connect morals with religion. The historian would like to know what race or nation does such a thing. Certainly the whites with whom the Negroes have come into contact have not done so.”

“You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.”

“God ... is white. ”

“Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”

“Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other [country]. ”

″[Steve] is writing the word Monster over and over again. A white hand (O’BRIEN’s) takes the pencil from his hand and crosses out all the Monsters.”

″ I didn’t know I was even supposed to have issues until I came to America. ”

“You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country.”

″ He expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel. ”

“The first day in Oakland he and Rocky walked down the street together and a big Chrysler stopped in the street and an old white woman rolled down the window and said, ‘God bless you, God bless you,’ but it was the uniform, not them, she blessed.”

“He could still see the face of the little boy, looking back at him, smiling, and he tried to vomit that image from his head because it was Rocky’s smiling face from a long time before, when they were little kids together.”

″‘Those people,’ he said, pointing in the direction the women and children had gone, ‘I thought they locked them up.’ ‘Oh, that was some years back. Right after Pearl Harbor. But now they’ve turned them all loose again. Sent them home.‘”

“We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.”

“She is not béké like you, but she is béké, and not like us either.”

“Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah too.”

“White shouldn’t be the default any more than straight should be the default. There shouldn’t even be a default.”

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”

“I had begun to notice that my mother became irritated when I questioned her about whites and blacks, and I could not quite understand it.”

“In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.”

“Seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is the problem. The fact that the meaning of race may evolve over time or lose much of its significance is hardly a reason to be struck blind. ”

“Not merely a Master Race whose sole task is to rule, but a Race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength... strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative.”

“The more conceited members of the race think in terms of an endless ascent—or promotion ad infinitum. I would point out that, sooner or later, man must reach his level of life-incompetence.”

“She was caught between two allegiances...Herself. Her race.”

“Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?”

″‘Seem like there is chains about my feet, time I get this far,’ she said.”

″ ‘Whew’ said D to E F G. ‘I’ll beat you to the top of the coconut tree.’ ”

“Even though the Point was only half an hour’s drive from the Port, the two towns didn’t have much to do with one another. The footy was really the only place where Nungas and Goonyas got to hand around together.”

“‘Nukkin ya?’ said Pickles. ‘Geez, you’re talking like one of them now.’ ‘So what,’ I said. ‘Well I s’pose he is a mate of yours and all,’ said Pickles. ‘Matter of fact, he is,’ I said.”

“I wondered why white blokes didn’t worry about the Moodagudda much.”

“Johnny Warren says there’s lots of things aren’t fair in our town. Like blacks aren’t supposed to drink in the pub, not many of them anyway; and not him.”

“Yeah, but you’re from this small town, eh. The Department’s crazy about helping kids from places like this get a fair go. They’ll help you with things they wouldn’t do for black kids living in the city.”

″‘My Mum and Dad reckon it stinks, that’s what.’ ‘What stinks?’ asked Brett, still keeping his voice low. ‘That blacks get things for nothing that everyone else has to work hard for.‘”

″“I remember how happy Gracey was that afternoon, but it didn’t last long. When they got off that bus, every one of those kids was celebrating, white kids, black kids, it didn’t matter, but the next morning all the fun was washed out of the white kids.”

″‘You can’t be Peter Pan,’ whispered Natalie. ‘He isn’t black.’ But Grace kept her hand up.”

“Now it the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.”

“Boy bands, fan fiction, soap operas, reality TV, most shows and movies with female main characters . . . We’re still so rarely front and center, even rarer when you consider race and sexuality, and then when we do get something that’s just for us, we’re made to feel bad for liking it. We can’t win.”

“Black people were treated different than white people, that was plain to see, but Eliza said nobody could tell her what to do or where to go, and no one would ever, ever beat her again.

″‘Wouldn’t you like to go in for a race?’ they asked Dave. But Dave didn’t feel like racing. He was missing Dogger too much.”

“It’d probably work out. No good worrying too much. But it would be strange actually having a boy living indoors. He got on well with most of the black kids at school, but having one at home all the time would be bound to be a bit different.”

“They were not medical problems to rehabilitate. We were not medical problems. I was never going to undo the damage polio had done to my nerve cells and walk again, nor was this my goal. The disabled veterans coming home from the Vietnam War were never going to grow their limbs back or heal their spinal cords and walk again. My friends with muscular dystrophy were never going to not have been born with muscular dystrophy. Accidents, illnesses, genetic conditions, neurological disorders, and aging are facts of the human condition, just as much as race or sex.”

“I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men . . . desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it.”

“Though we lived side by side throughout the South, communication between the two races had simply ceased to exist. Neither really knew what went on with those of the other race.”

“Until we as a race can learn to rise together, we’ll never get anywhere. That’s our trouble. We work against one another instead of together.”

“Wanting to hear it from Timothy, I asked him why there were different colors of skin, white and black, brown and red, and he laughed back, “Why b’feesh different color, or flower b’different color? I true don’ know, Phill-eep, but I true tink beneath d’skin is all d’same.”

“The father now dead, the now-freed son wished to build something on those acres of land that would last for centuries to come. A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.”

“You were supposed to be safe in Mallard-that strange, separate town- hidden amongst your own. But even here, where nobody married dark, you were still colored and that meant that white men could kill you for refusing to die. The Vignes twins were reminders of this, tiny girls in funeral dresses who grew up without a daddy because white men decided that it would be so.”

“All there was to being white was acting like you were.”

“thou tellest of running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him!