Quotes about Race

It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else's blood.

there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. 'They don't know when to stop,' she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever.

Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can't stay away from one another a whole day. So. It looks to me like you the envy of the world.

If whiteness is an illusion, on what else can a poor man without prospects pride himself?

There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.

Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all by themselves with no help from the mind.

if she wishes to be American—to be known as such and to actually belong—she must become a thing unimaginable in her home country: she must become white.

The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of maters.

Of all the wishes people had brought him—money, love, revenge—this seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserving of fulfillment. 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.

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn't even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.

Our founding fathers' failure to apply the principles of freedom that they were espousing to the area of race is a prominent reason why many minority individuals today are less than enthusiastic to join in with those in our nation who want to exalt or restore America's history and heritage. God's kingdom does

The problem with race in America is not fundamentally a problem of skin. It is a problem of sin. It is a problem in that people have not been willing to address the sin that has led to a division among skin as we hold tenaciously to our cultures. Our backgrounds and preferences are legitimate, but when they overrule God, that's when Jesus says, "You are wrong.