Famous Racism Quotes

‘Race and racism is a reality that so many of us grow up learning to just deal with. But if we ever hope to move past it, it can’t just be on people of colour to deal with it.

‘It’s up to all of us – Black, white, everyone – no matter how well-meaning we think we might be, to do the honest, uncomfortable work of rooting it out. It starts with self-examination and listening to those whose lives are different from our own. It ends with justice, compassion, and empathy that manifests in our lives and on our streets.’ – Michelle Obama

“White privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, an absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost.”― Reni Eddo-Lodge

‘In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.’ – Angela Davis

“Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can’t afford to stay silent.”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge

“Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.”― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”― Abraham Lincoln

“The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery.”― Frederick Douglass

“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war. And until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation, until the colour of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes. And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race, there is war. And until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, rule of international morality, will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained… now everywhere is war.”― Haile Selassie I

“I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.”― Martin Luther King Jr

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women – black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”― Harper Lee

“What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.”― Christopher Hitchens

“Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.”― Muhammad Ali

“Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.”― Kofi Annan

“We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity.”
― Fred Hampton

“When I’m born I’m black, when I grow up I’m black, when I’m in the sun I’m black, when I’m sick I’m black, when I die I’m black, and you… when you’re born you’re pink, when you grow up you’re white, when you’re cold you’re blue, when you’re sick you’re blue, when you die you’re green and you dare call me colored”― Oglala Lakota

“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.”― Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.”― Thomas Sowell

“Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.”― Martin Luther King Jr

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental rights.__Desmond Tutu

“Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person.”― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Achievement has no color”― Abraham Lincoln

“As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash”― Harper Lee

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”― Audre Lorde

“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them”― Elie Wiesel

“I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust…We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.”― Thurgood Marshall

“At the heart of racism is the religious assertion that God made a creative mistake when He brought some people into being.” – Friedrich Otto Hertz

“The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.”― Christopher Hitchens

“There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and will not be today and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”― James Baldwin

“If all men are made in God’s reflection, then why do some people continue to acknowledge only what is in their part of the mirror? If every man was created equal and in the image of God, then how can any man claim that one race is better than another?”― Suzy Kassem

“…jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.”― Noam Chomsky

“It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.”― James Weldon Johnson

“You are there and to their ears, being a Syrian sounds like you’re unclean, shameful, indecent; it’s like you owe the world an apology for your very existence.”― Asaad Almohammad

“…racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.”― Chris Crutcher

“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,
and if one says that one is not good enough to have a job that is a solid quality job, if one is not
good enough to have access to public accommodations, if one is not good enough to have the
right to vote, if one is not good enough to live next door to him, if one is not good enough to
marry his daughter because of his race. Then at that moment, that person is saying that that
person who is not good to do all of this is not fit to exist or to live. And that is the ultimate logic of racism.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.”― Maya Angelou

“The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right to protect yourself. Why is it ‘ominous’ when black people even talk of having rifles? Why don’t we have the right to self-defense? Is it because maybe you know we’re going to have to defend ourselves against you?”― James Baldwin

“Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty….A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles.”― Toni Morrison

“That’s just how white folks will do you. It wasn’t merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn’t know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserved of their scorn.”― Barack Obama

“Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.”― Dr. Benjamin Spock

“To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.”― Peter Singer

“I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people. ”― Toni Morrison

“This is God’s universe and he is the master gardener of all. If we were to eliminate all colors in his garden,then what would be a rainbow with only one color? Or a garden with only one kind of flower? Why would the Creator create a vast assortment of plants, ethnicities, and animals, if only one beast or seed is to dominate all of existence?”― Suzy Kassem

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character._Martin Luther King

A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi … has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It’s not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for._Thurgood Marshall