Black White Relations Quotes & Sayings

Relations between black and white would be greatly improved if we were more accepting of our fears and our feelings and more vocal about it. — Sarah Silverman

White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies. — Tom Robbins

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.

No one in the world
in the entire world
know more
knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here
and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other. — James Baldwin

When I came back I joined a black church in Oakland and that made me feel more at home, a bit like being connected to India. It felt funny to be around so many white people when I came back to the United States. It still bothers me. One of the things I liked living in Hawaii years later was the racial complexity of it. I remember that at the time when Sucheng and I got married--we met as graduate students at Berkeley and have been married almost forty years--one of the first houses we bought was in a Black neighborhood in west Berkeley and we didn't quite notice how uniformly Black it was until some weeks later. I said to Sucheng, "You know, we're the only white people in this neighborhood." And she looked at me and said: "Speak for yourself, honkie! — Mark Juergensmeyer

One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled. As the motorcade drove by, people cheered, held up their smartphones to record the procession, and waved American flags. To be within feet of the president seemed like the thrill of their lives. I was astounded. An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me. And then I remembered, it was what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama's star shoot across the political sky. I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days, which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Under the white population of the United States of America only the reactionary classes oppres the black population. Under no circumstance can they represent the workers, farmers and revolutionary intellectuals and other enlighted people who form the majority of the white population. — Mao Tse-tung

The relation between the white and black races in Africa in many ways resembles the relation between the two sexes.
If the one of the two sexes were told that they did not play any greater part in the life of the other sex than this other sex plays within their own existence, they would be shocked and hurt.
[ ... ]
If they (white people) had been told that they played no more important part in the lives of the Natives than the Natives played in their own lives, they would have been highly indignant and ill at ease.
If you had told the Natives that they played no greater part in the life of the white people than the white people played in their lives, they would never have believed you, but would have laughed at you. Probably in Natives circles, stories are passing about, and being repeated, which prove the all-absorbing interest of the white people in the Kikuyu or Kavirondo, and their complete dependence upon them. — Karen Blixen

There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different. One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same level as a white individual, and yet also say that the number of black individuals who actually qualify for that status will be small. One thinks of Serena Williams, whose dominance and stunning achievements can't, in and of themselves, ensure equal access to tennis facilities for young black girls. The gate is open and yet so very far away. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

White supremacy is a black person telling the people of Baltimore to chill out and try peace, thinking they came up with that thought all on their own. — Darnell Lamont Walker

You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I've never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations. — Henry Louis Gates

If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society. — Wendell Berry

Like so much of cool hunting, Hilfiger's marketing journey feeds off the alienation at the heart of America's race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth. — Naomi Klein

Linnie. And this Winnie." They wore identical smiles, their bright black eyes sparked with curiosity. "Are you the doctor?"
"No, I'm just volunteering."
"I knowed that, too." Winnie gave her an exaggerated shake of the head. "Girls is never the doctor. They's the nurses."
"Oh no, what about Dr. Clare? Huh? The lady doctor who took care of Grammy in the hospital when she broke her hip bone?" Linnie asked.
"Yeah, but she was a white lady. They can be doctors." Winnie looked at Lucy. "Right? There are white lady doctors. I seen 'em."
Lucy felt her eyes go wide. Were there children who still believed your gender or color dictated your career? "There are white lady doctors, black lady doctors, white man doctors, black man doctors."
They stared at her.
She thought for a moment. "And there are white man nurses and black man nurses, too."
"Now you're just bein' silly," Linnie said and let out a laugh. — Mary Jane Hathaway

Not only does a lens distort forms, but the ordinary plate makes an unholy mess of colour in its tone relations. Yellow becomes black, and blue white. Black sunflowers against a white sky - what a travesty! — Walter J. Phillips

When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free - (Chapter 9). — Shirley Chisholm

She trained the girls in her Girl Scout troop to believe that they could be anything, and she went to lengths to prevent negative stereotypes of their race from shaping their internal views of themselves and other Negroes. It was difficult enough to rise above the silent reminders of Colored signs on the bathroom doors and cafeteria tables. But to be confronted with the prejudice so blatantly, there in that temple to intellectual excellence and rational thought, by something so mundane, so ridiculous, so universal as having to go to the bathroom...In the moment when the white women laughed at her, Mary had been demoted from professional mathematician to a second-class human being, reminded that she was a black girl whose piss wasn't good enough for the white pot. — Margot Lee Shetterly

When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The courde of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system's defeat and demise. [ ... ] The central subject, the essence, the core relations between Europeans and Africans during the colonial era, was the difference of race, of skin color. Everything-each eaxchange, connection, conflict-was translated into the language of black and white. [ ... ] Into the African was inculcated the notion that the white man was untouchable, unconquerable, that whites constitute a homogenous, cohesive force. [ ... ] Then, suddenly, Africans recruited into the British and French armies in Europe observed that the white men were fighting one another, shooting one another, destroying one another's cities. It was revelation, a surprise, a shock. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together. — Marcus Garvey

Here's the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before. — Anonymous

Just like "All American" means "White," "All Lives" means "White. — Darnell Lamont Walker

Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"
they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108) — Cornel West

Harrison, Arkansas, a town of 12,000, which is over 90% White, has a 'Task Force On Race Relations', and elected city officials invite the NAACP in from the other (black) end of the state to hold parades and bury caskets labeled 'racism'. — Billy Roper

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future. — Audre Lorde

Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another? — Joyce Carol Oates

In a manner akin to the influence of Tiger Woods on the other side of the Atlantic, Thierry Henry has helped kick down a few of the remaining bigoted stereotypes. Through his undisputable class and dignity, Henry has made a deep-seated difference to race relations in this country. Racism will flounder whenever white children grow up with a black man as their hero. That so few comment on Henry's colour is a silent tribute to his impact. — Pete Gill

Fo' it be so clear to me now, with my family being black an white, that though we blacks have it very hard fo' very long, we don't own suffering. Abuse, slavery, injustice, an tribulation be part of human living. An if there be a question that be worth axing, rather than it be bout white or black, we might be wanting to ax how come it's always us humans who be suffering an be mean to one another. We might want a be axing that instead. From: Accidents of Birth Trilogy — Christina Carson

When black fury meets white denial, you have the combustible and fundamentally changed race relations we live in today. — Ferial Haffajee

It is wonderful how much depends upon the relations of black and white A black and white, if properly balanced, suggests colour. — Winslow Homer

The spectacle of the shooting suggest an event out of time, as if the killing of black people with white-supremacist justification interrupts anything other than regular television programming. But Dylan Storm Roof did not create himself from nothing. He as grown up with the rhetoric and orientation of racism. — Jesmyn Ward

The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.
In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America. — Tim Wise

I've always looked at America like a foster mother doing it only for the check. At any minute, I just knew she'd be ready to give up on me. — Darnell Lamont Walker

All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen. A — Charles Dickens

Does anyone in this room have it?"
"No, Chris, no one here has it."
"How do you know?"
"Because the mark was dark skin. Negroes are the descendants of Cain."
I didn't have my civil-rights sensibilities yet, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about God ... — Chris Crutcher

Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundation. — James Baldwin

Bob had been caught by the white death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the South. I had heard whispered tales of black boys having sex relations with white prostitutes in the hotels in town, but I had never paid any close attention to them; now those tales came home to me in the form of the death of a man I knew. I did not search for a job that day; I returned home — Richard Wright

White is not always light and black is not always dark. — Habeeb Akande

The stark racial differences in crime rates undoubtedly impact black-white relations in America. So long as they persist, young black men will make people nervous. Discussions about the problem can be useful if they are honest, which is rare. Liberals don't help matters by making excuses for counterproductive behavior. Nor does the media by shying away from reporting the truth. — Jason L. Riley

Superior, do you understand me? These are white people. They are not like you, or me or us. They have the power to hurt you ... and sometimes it's fun to them when they do. Their power is not because they are smart ... it's because ... something happened sometime ... started somewhere and they got on top of the world. They got the power. The only power you got is to learn to live with them, learn to read their minds ... til you can do better. They don't treat each other right ... so don't you look to be treated right. You hear me? Sometimes there's good white people ... but don't you act like that til you know that. — J. California Cooper