Southern Racist Quotes & Sayings

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life. — James Wright

How happy I am to see myself as imperfect and to be in need of God's mercy. — Therese Of Lisieux

I don't care what you think unless it is about me. — Kurt Cobain

In the general election, Nixon refined Goldwater's southern strategy. Unlike Goldwater, who "ran as a racist candidate," Nixon said, the 1968 GOP nominee campaigned on racial themes without explicitly mentioning race. "Law and order" replaced "states' rights." Pledging to weaken the enforcement of civil rights laws replaced outright opposition to them. Nixon "always couched his views in such a way that a citizen could avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal," said his top aide, John Ehrlichman. — Ari Berman

The colonization of the Southern economy by capitalists from the North gave lynching its most vigorous impulse. If Black people, by means of terror and violence, could remain the most brutally exploited group within the swelling ranks of the working class, the capitalists could enjoy a double advantage. Extra profits would result from the superexploitation of Black labor, and white workers' hostilities toward their employers would be defused. White workers who assented to lynching necessarily assumed a posture of racial solidarity with the white men who were really their oppressors. This was a critical moment in the popularization of racist ideology. — Angela Y. Davis

When working abroad you work pretty hard, but with time off, this is the greatest job in the world. You drive. You explore Memphis, or wherever you've landed, or go and see Dr John, or the Californian landscape. And, yes, I've had a few good meals. — Toby Jones

I grew up with my two sisters and my mom, so it's my lot in life to be surrounded by women. — Bill Hader

Curator Shantrelle P. Lewis left for Amsterdam an Andy Warhol fellow, and came back with a film in her pocket. Please support this confrontation of the Netherlands' violently passive aggressive racist traditions, by an American Southern, aggressive aggressive. She's a top notch thinker and lover of questions ... — Dream Hampton

I have been given permission to announce that I and others from 'All My Children' have been approached by the company Prospect Park, who bought 'AMC,' with the intention to move it online. — Cameron Mathison

I was in Africa once. I was in Kenya. I got off the plane, and I thought, 'Africa ... ' Some guy in a dashiki said, 'Mr. Bundy. Oh my God, it's you.' — Ed O'Neill

The New Deal never rethought the draconian racist immigration restriction policies of the 20s, of course, but its electoral base rested significantly on "ethnic" voters, whose activism was both hemmed in and rewarded by the Democrats. Southern and Eastern Europeans were included as secondary leaders of the new industrial unions, and as entitled citizens qualified for social security, unemployment compensation, and fair labor standards protections, even as workers of color were largely left out of key areas of the welfare state. — David Roediger

Car radios blared in the night, generally pitting a gang in favor of Neil Young's "Southern Man," which chastised the South for its flagrant racism, against those who preferred Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama," which chastised Neil Young for chastising the South and which praised the blatantly racist Alabama governor George Wallace. — Brent Hendricks

Of course many southern whites did switch from voting Democrat to voting Republican, helping the GOP become the majority party in the South, as the Democrats once were. But remember that racism declined sharply in the South during the second half of the twentieth century. There is quite literally a mountain of scholarly data that documents this. And this was the very period of GOP ascendancy. So as the South became less racist, it became more Republican. I provide evidence in this book to show that southern whites became Republican not for racist motives but for economic ones. The most racist poor whites never left the Democratic Party; they remained loyal to the party of racism until they died. In this sense, the data show that racism slowed the movement of whites toward the Republicans. — Dinesh D'Souza