Racism

"While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community."

"I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all, I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White."

"Not long ago, but before World War II was over, a young Negro girl was asked how she would punish Hitler. Answer: "Paint him black and bring him over here.""

"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied.""

"In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes... in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and street cars."

"Segregation is wrong because it is a system of adultery perpetuated by an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality."

"This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilising drug of . Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children."

"A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. ... Any law that uplifts the human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority."

"There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites Only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.""

"There are 55,000 Negro college graduates in the United States. Most Southern whites have never seen one."

"The economic cost of segregation is of course preposterous and staggering. It is a cardinal reason why the South is so poor. In effect, it means that two sets of everything from schools to insane asylums to penitentiaries to playgrounds have to be maintained."

"It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism."

"American families are in the process of passing along a $9 trillion legacy from one generation to the next. ... Hand in hand with this money, I submit, what is really being handed down from generation to generation is the profound legacy of reproducing racial inequality. The legacy is difficult to discern because the language of family heritage hides it from our political consciousness."

"I can't condition myself to see or to rebel against institutional privilege if I can't first see them in myself."

"It is the Capitalist bourgeoisie that creates inequality as a way to divide and rule over the entire working class. White skin privilege is a form of domination by Capital over white labor as well as oppressed nationality labor, not just providing material incentives to "buy off" white workers and set them against Black and other oppressed workers. This explains the obedience of white labor to Capitalism and the State. The white working class does not see their better off condition as part of the system of exploitation. After centuries of political and social indoctrination, they feel their privileged position is just and proper, and what is more has been "earned." They feel threatened by social gains of non-white workers, which is why they so vehemently opposed affirmative action plans to benefit minorities in jobs and hiring, and to redress years of discrimination against them. It is also why white workers have opposed most civil rights legislation."

"Whites have inherited wealth that was ostensibly generated on the backs of African Americans. What's passed down through generations is an abdication of responsibility for this legacy and for the spoils that even working-class whites continue to reap from it. The situation is akin to finding a bloodied bag of money at your doorstep every month and spending it freely without seriously questioning where it came from or whose blood has been spilled to make it possible."

"You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying, "Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please." You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "You are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. And this is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact, and equality as a result."

"White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank."

"Whiteface (performance)-->"

"List of entertainers known to have performed in blackface"

"Racebending"

"List of blackface minstrel songs"

"Rick Ford: During the threat of an assassination attempt, I appeared convincingly in front of Congress as Barack Obama."

"Mac: A lot of great actors have done blackface."

"Border Morris"

"List of blackface minstrel troupes"

"In this mean work of detraction, we scarcely need say that the miserable dough-face who edits the Cass paper in this city, and through whom our daughter was basely excluded from "Seward Seminary," on account of her complexion, very appropriately took the lead. This self-elected umpire of taste in the city of Rochester, claims as much skill in matters relating to the harmony of sounds, as he assumes with respect to the harmony of colors. We warn the good people of Rochester against attending either seminaries or concerts, on pain of being expelled from respectable and refined society, should they venture to do so before obtaining the opinion of this "most learned judge" whose word is sufficient to set at defiance and veto the wishes of a whole seminary of young ladies and misses. We believe he does not object to the "Virginia Minstrels," "Christy's Minstrels," the "Ethiopian Serenaders," or any of the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens. Those performers are undoubtedly in harmony with his refined and elegant taste!"

"Partly from a love of music, and partly from curiosity to see persons of color exaggerating the peculiarities of their race, we were induced last evening to hear these Serenaders. The Company is said to be composed entirely of colored people, and it may be so. We observed, however, that they too had recourse to the burnt cork and lamp black, the better to express their characters and to produce uniformity of complexion. Their lips, too, were evidently painted, and otherwise exaggerated. Their singing generally was but an imitation of white performers, and not even a tolerable representation of the character of colored people. Their attempts at wit showed them to possess a plentiful lack of it, and gave their audience a very low idea of the shrewdness and sharpness of the race to which they belong. With two or three exceptions, they were a poor set, and will make themselves ridiculous wherever they go. We heard but one really fine voice among the whole, and that was Cooper's, who is truly an excellent singer; and a company possessing equal ability with himself, would no doubt, be very successful in commanding the respect and patronage of the public generally. Davis (the Bones) too, is certainly a master player; but the Tambourine was an utter failure. B. Richardson is an extraordinary character. His Virginia Breakdown excelled anything which we have ever seen of that description of dancing. He is certainly far before the dancer in the Company of the Campbells. We are not sure that our readers will approve of our mention of those persons, so strong must be their dislike of everything that seems to feed the flame of American prejudice against colored people; and in this they may be right, but we think otherwise. It is something gained when the colored man in any form can appear before a white audience; and we think that even this company, with industry, application, and a proper cultivation of their taste, may yet be instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race. But they must cease to exaggerate the exaggerations of our enemies; and represent the colored man rather as he is, than as Ethiopian Minstrels usually represent him to be. They will then command the respect of both races; whereas now they only shock the taste of the one, and provoke the disgust of the other. Let Cooper, Davis and Richardson bring around themselves persons of equal skill, and seek to improve, relying more upon the refinement of the public, than its vulgarity; let them strive to conform to it, rather than to cater to the lower elements of the baser sort, and they may do much to elevate themselves and their race in popular estimation."

"Censored Eleven"

"Little Black Sambo"

"Blackface is a form of cross-dressing, in which one puts on the insignias of a sex, class, or race that stands in binary opposition to one's own. Current attention to cross-dressing, however, derives from gender and not racial studies. There are good theoretical reasons to privilege sexual over racial cross-dressing, since the construction of sexual difference is a universal feature of culture. Sexual and racial cross-dressing may not do the same work, a possibility that problematizes the use of gender cross-dressing theory to answer the question raised by race. But where the prevailing historical cross-dressing practice has been grounded on race, then the theory must do justice to the resulting sexuoracial system."

"Portrayal of East Asians in Hollywood"

"We are told that it's this form of fundamentalist religion represented by this Wahhabi-influenced Islamic, if you will, ideology or view that has created, if you will, a seedbed for people to become violent, to become anti-American, and to do the kinds of things that we call "extremism" now. Is that true? I don't think it has to do with Islam. I don't think it has to do with any form of this Islamic interpretation. Of course there is a problem with dogma. But I think the problem lies with the political systems that use religion."

"In Europe, being pro-America and being pro-Israel makes you almost an endangered species."

"A country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people"

"We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

"God bless America? No, no! No, not God bless America! God damn America! It's in the Bible!"

"We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it."

"The Americans, my people, are our enemies."

"This country wasn't built on moral fiber. This country was built on rape, slavery, murder, degradation and affiliation with crime."

"Anti-Americanism has been endemic among the ruling classes in continental Europe since 1776 at the latest."

"Americans are the friendliest people you will encounter, but they have few friends."

"Clinton saw the Khomeinist regime as 'progressist'; a view shared by many American liberals who think anti-Americanism is the surest sign of progressive beliefs. That's a lie."

"Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!"

"America is the object of their loathing because, for a half-century or more, she has been the most prosperous and creative capitalist society on earth. Ultimately it is liberal democracy - or quite simply liberty itself - that they are eager to destroy, even though they are among its foremost beneficiaries, being free to travel anywhere, anytime in order to hatch their plots. If their diktats were carried out, if frontier barriers were reestablished everywhere, with passports and visas even for tourists, there could have been no Seattle and no Goteborg."

"There is a big difference between being anti-American and being critical of the United States. Once again, critiques are appropriate and necessary, provided that they rest on facts and address real abuses, real errors and real excesses, without deliberately losing sight of America's wise decisions, beneficent interventions and salutary policies. But critiques of this kind, balanced, fair and well-founded are hard to find, except in America herself: in the daily press in weekly news magazines, on television and radio, and in highbrow monthly journals, which are more widely read than their equivalents in Europe... Strangely, it is always America that is described as degenerate and 'fascist', while it is solely in Europe that actual dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up."

"Recently, those who have criticized the actions of the U.S. Government... have been called “anti-American.”...The term “anti-American” is usually used by the American establishment to discredit... its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he... will be judged before they are heard, and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride. But what does the term “anti-American” mean? Does it mean... that you’re opposed to freedom of speech?... That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias?...that you don’t admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam?...that you hate all Americans? This sly conflation of America’s culture, music, literature, the breathtaking physical beauty of the land, the ordinary pleasures of ordinary people with criticism of the U.S. government’s foreign policy (about which, thanks to America’s “free press”, sadly most Americans know very little) is a deliberate and extremely effective strategy. To call someone “anti-American”, indeed to be anti-American, (or... anti-Indian or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it’s a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those the establishment has set out for you... If you don’t love us, you hate us... If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists."

"Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars."

"Much has been said about the shocking 'militarization' of the police, and how this seemed to many like a provocation. Police in Ferguson were encased in armor that one veteran remarked was heavier than anything he wore in Iraq, and now the cry has gone up. Demilitarize the police! Take away their MRAPs, their forest camouflage, and all the paraphernalia of intimidation that accompanies them into battle. Representative Alan Grayson introduced legislation, shortly before Ferguson exploded, that would have ended the Pentagon program which funneled this gear into local police departments, but it was voted down. Several newer versions are in the works, and a good thing too, but this is attacking the symptoms rather than the disease. The disease is imperialism, otherwise known as U.S. foreign policy. The underlying condition is the American empire, an international regime of terror and exploitation which cannot be expected to treat its own citizens much better than it treats its overseas subjects. How on earth did we ever expect otherwise?"

"For this "Fair Land of Freedom" I do not give a damn! I'm glad I fit against it, I only wish we'd won, and I don't want no pardon for anything I done. I hates the Constitution, this "Great Republic", too! I hates the Freedman's Bureau and uniforms of blue! I hates the nasty eagle with all its brags and fuss, and the lying, thieving Yankees, I hates them wuss and wuss! I hates the Constitution, this "Great Republic", too! I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do. I hates the Declaration of Independence, too!"