No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.

Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

We must never remain silent in the face of bigotry. We must condemn those who seek to divide us. In all quarters and at all times, we must teach tolerance and denounce racism, anti-Semitism and all ethnic or religious bigotry wherever they exist as unacceptable evils. We have no place for haters in America — none, whatsoever.

No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.

Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can.

I believe all Americans who believe in freedom, tolerance and human rights have a responsibility to oppose bigotry and prejudice based on sexual orientation.

Our true nationality is mankind.

What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.

is it necessary for every good white person to walk around feeling uncomfortable about themselves as abstractly complicit in a racist system before we see political change?

I have said — and this is something very different — that colonialist Europe has grafted modern abuse onto ancient injustice, hateful racism onto old inequality.

Every Black filmmaker you love, has at least 10 projects that he can’t get made in Hollywood. Sequels that fans scream for, don’t get made because of the system in place. The world is missing out and it’s a shame cause the money is there 10 folds.

The [basketball] floor comes easy; I’ve been doing that for a long time. But what’s not easy is growing up black in America.

Racism is a very confusing word these days. But when I say that White Fragility is a racist book, what I mean is it does not allow Black people to be full human beings, because full human beings deal with the imperfections of life.

Racism had grown out of slavery and exploitation and was very hard to eradicate quickly and completely.

Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

Racism and hatred are synonymous.

What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.

How I wish we lived in a time when laws were not necessary to safeguard us from discrimination.

I want a hairy little Jewish Princess with a brand new nose, who knows where it goes.

Affirmative action is the most important modern anti-discrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination. No one who knows anything about the subject would say it hasn’t worked. It has certainly done something, or else it wouldn’t have provoked so much opposition.

Work is valued by the social value of the worker.

On the field, blacks have been able to be super giants. But, once our playing days are over, this is the end of it and we go back to the back of the bus again.

I’m not black, but there’s a whole lot of times I wish I could say I’m not white.

Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

Laundry is the only thing that should be separated by color. – – UnknownRacism rests upon and functions as a kind of seesaw: the persecutor rises by debasing and inferiorizing his victim.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

Don’t you know sugar is brown first? White folks couldn’t stand the fact that something so sweet shared the same color as the people who cut the cane, slopped the hogs and picked the cotton. So they bleached it to resemble them, and now they done gone and fooled everybody. You included.

Racial terrorism affects the lives of white people and black people and everyone, everything. Racism is contaminating. It can affect the dogs in the street. So the process of beginning to rid the country of prejudice was in itself a kind of nation-building.

The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem.

I think racism is a bottom-line AIDS issue. And I think homophobia is a bottom-line AIDS issue, and sexism and class issues and all of this. I think that we are not going to solve the AIDS epidemic unless we deal with these issues, and vice versa.

That’s just how white folks will do you. It wasn’t merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn’t know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserved of their scorn.

The question of whether one alleges the Superiority or Inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist’s sense of his own Inferiority.