Quotes about Race

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

Here's the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it's put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don't call them a white film. I'm trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.

I was asked by an NPR reporter once why don't I talk about race that often. I said, 'It's because I'm a neurosurgeon.' And she thought that was a strange response... I said, 'You see, when I take someone to the operating room, I'm actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn't make them who they are.'

For lo, what changes time can bring! The cycles of revolving years May free my heart from all its fears, And teach my lips a song to sing. Before yon field of trembling gold Is garnered into dusty sheaves, Or ere the autumn's scarlet leaves Flutter as birds adown the wold, I may have run the glorious race, And caught the torch while yet aflame, And called upon the holy name Of Him who now doth hide His face. ARONA.

Tell um de good Lawd dont keer whether he bright er not. Dont nobody but white trash keer dat.

He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad.

He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Moses and the children of Israel were the same, and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had to be spilled in order that the black race might cross into the Promised Land.

So that's it, he said. Three hundred dollars. I wish somebody would come into this country with a seed that had to be worked everyday from New Year's right on through Christmas. As soon as you niggers are laid-by, trouble starts.

There now. Just look at what your grandpa did to that poor old nigger." "Yes," I said. "Now he can spend day after day marching in parades. If it hadn't been for my grandfather, he'd have to work like whitefolks.

When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray.

If it weren't for the likes of Sharpton, Jackson, the Congressional Black Caucus, Barack Obama, and the NAACP, racial strife in America would be a distant memory.

Always their men would be fighters, quick to take offense, slow to forgive. To their children and to their children's children they would hand down their love of race, their personal loyalties, their stubbornnesses, their distrust of governments, their servility to no man. These are their strengths and their weaknesses, their glory—and sometimes, Christy, their damnation.