Quotes about white (2946 quotes, page 28)

“[The house] looked like an enormous white box which was still not large enough to contain all the troubles and woes of the owners.”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

Из художественных произведений

Housing , Box

“If you have weapons, take them home; if you do not have them, please do not seek to get them. We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. Remember the words of Jesus: «He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword». We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries: «Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you». This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love. Remember, if I am stopped, this movement will not stop, because God is with the movement. Go home with this glowing faith and this radiant assurance.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Love , God , Hate , Faith

“I'm not a racist, it's my principle: despite the fact that I'm on a diet and I should eat only white meat I eat also red and dark (I hope this is not a racist words?) with great relish, enjoying every bite. ”

Брайанна Рид

Hope

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”

Тед Грант (1913–2006) South African activist

People , Color , Soul , Clothes

“Will power is the answer. Will power. No white bread, no Nestle's Crunch bars… I flinched and felt the last of the bars melting in my pockets.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

“Whenever there is discussion, I make it clear that I do not want any grey zones, just black and white.*
Grey zones do not interest me at all.”

Niki Lauda (1949–2019) Austrian former Formula 1 racing driver

Making love

“Football is the only sport where you put people together, it doesn’t matter if you are rich, or poor, or black, or white. It is one nation. This is the beauty of football.”

Pelé (1940–2022) Brazilian association football player

Sport , Beauty , Football , People

“The Red Army has been created by the workers for the struggle with the White Army of capital. The Red Army issued out the civil war; it will disappear when a complete victory has been gained in the war, when class has been abolished when the dictatorship of the proletariat has lapsed.”

Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) Soviet politician

Source: ABC's of Communism, Ch.8, pp. 268

War , Victory

“But officially Mantell had chased the planet Venus, metamorphosed later into a Skyhook balloon, and thus, alas, met his death. ...This Venus idea makes it very hard to understand a sighting at White Sands Rocket Testing Ground, New Mexico, where a flying saucer was tracked by radar, and found to be cantering along at a mere 18,000 m.p.h.”

George Adamski (1891–1965) American ufologist

Flying Saucers Have Landed

Death , Understanding , Flying , Idea

“He hated coming on the set and despised me because I wore white shoes.”

Barry Hines (1939–2016) British author

From DVD audio commentary with Mick Jackson: Threads: remastered. Director: Mick Jackson. 1984. 2-disc special edition. Severin Films Inc., 2017.
About, Mick Jackson

Hate , Shoe

“Women are stripped to the skin in the presence of leering, white-skinned, black-hearted brutes and lashed into insensibility and strangled to death from the limbs of trees. A girl child of fifteen years was lynched recently by these brutal bullies. Where has justice fled? The eloquence of Wendell Phillips is silent now. John Brown’s body lies moldering in the grave. But will his spirit lie there moldering, too? Brutes, inhuman monsters—you heartless brutes—you whom nature forms by molding you in it, deceive not yourselves by thinking that another John Brown will not arise.”

Lucy Parsons (1853–1942) American communist anarchist labor organizer

"Southern Lynching" (April 1892)

Tree , Justice , Girl , Heart

“The seeming helplessness of our cousins strikes me as amusing when it is not annoying. I am sure what they wish in their hearts is that we would haul down the Stars and Stripes and hoist the White Ensign in all our ships. What particularly irks me is their strong liking for mixed forces, which as you know approached anathema to me. I am willing to take over additional tasks- and we have done so- but I cannot be expected to agree to help them cling to tasks that they themselves say they are unable to do unless we lend them our ships and other forces. I think we have done enough for them in their Home Fleet.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

In a letter from King to Admiral Harold B. Stark in November 1943, as quoted in Churchill's Anchor: Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound (2000) by Robin Brodhurst.
1940s

Home , Strong , Star , Help

“Venetian Memories. Jane has agreed to have copied in her brain some of Paul’s memory-traces. After she recovers consciousness in the post-surgery room, she has a new set of vivid apparent memories. She seems to remember walking on the marble paving of a square, hearing the flapping of flying pigeons and the cries of gulls, and seeing light sparkling on green water. One apparent memory is very clear. She seems to remember looking across the water to an island, where a white Palladian church stood out brilliantly against a dark thundercloud.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 220

Light , Water , Memory , Flying

“Military men! Damn it, they always thought in terms of hardware, black or white, our side or the other side. It was damned hard to get them to see gray at all, and getting them to tell dark gray from medium gray was impossible!”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 12, p. 125

Men

“Well I was concerned, back even at that early age of not quite 28, that as an African American woman entering the field of national security and foreign policy for the first time, that if I accepted a job in African policy at that stage without having demonstrated my ability to work on a wider range of issues, I feared, I think legitimately, ... that I might well get pigeonholed in Africa. That people in this predominantly white national security establishment would see me as black working on Africa — and therefore not capable of, or suited to do, anything else. And I made that choice. Looking back on it, it was quite a bracing thing to do to turn down at that age a substantive policy job.”

Susan Rice (1964) 24th United States National Security Advisor

On her attempts to avoid being pigeonholed in her career in “Susan Rice Talks Of Balancing Career And Motherhood, Reflects On Benghazi” https://www.npr.org/2019/10/07/768059915/susan-rice-talks-of-balancing-career-and-motherhood-reflects-on-benghazi in NPR (2019 Oct 7)

Time , People , Thinking , Age

“If you look at the poems in Prelude, you can identify the later material by identifying the poems with more white space and unexpected line breaks. Grief did that to me and my writing. It exploded my expectations and introduced these blank pockets of deep feeling. My prose writing became more fluid and lyrical…”

Saeed Jones (1985) American poet

On how losing his mother affected his writing in “You and I Have Peril in Common: The Millions Interviews Saeed Jones” https://themillions.com/2019/11/saeed-jones-qa.html in The Millions (2019 Nov 21)

Feeling

“I don’t think anyone understands the Asian Americans’ place amidst this white and black culture. There’s something very specific to being Asian American that other peoples aren’t getting, and we haven’t learned how to define it, even amongst ourselves. We’re the Other. We’re always the Other, we can be here forever and we’re still foreign. We’ve impacted the culture, but third, fourth, fifth, sixth generations and still, you walk down the street and someone will look at you, and you will be foreign. That is what disturbs me.”

Philip Kan Gotanda (1951) American film director and playwright

On how Asians might fit into the Black-White dichotomy in the United States in “Philip Kan Gotanda by David Henry Hwang” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/philip-kan-gotanda-1/ in BOMB Magazine (1997 Jan 1)

Thinking , Understanding , People , Learning

“That this play is the first play by an Asian American at our existence, is proof of the great success white racism has had with us. America might love us. But America’s love is not good. It’s racist love. I don’t want it.”

Frank Chin (1940) American writer

On his play The Chickencoop Chinaman (as quoted in the book Notable Asian Americans http://smithsonianapa.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2009/10/chin-frank.pdf)

Love , Making love , Success

“My main concern was to write a novel that uses all of this stuff that is accessible, to write a novel that deals with white racism and Chinese American history and the real Chinese fairy tales and the heroic tradition, and to demonstrate that a Chinese American could do all of this without sending whites up the wall or alienating anybody…”

Frank Chin (1940) American writer

On his novel Donald Duk (as quoted in ““FRANK CHIN: HIS OWN VOICE” https://resisters.com/by-frank-abe/frank-chin-his-own-voice/ in the Bloombury Review; September 1991)

History

“Many cities are predominantly white in America, many larger cities; but with Pittsburgh, the whiteness there is a bit thicker, that it’s almost atmospherically white, spiritually white…”

Damon Young (writer) (1979) American writer and editor

On the racial makeup of Pittsburg in “Damon Young on How to Make It as a Writer in the 2020s: "Move to Pittsburgh" https://www.inverse.com/article/56127-damon-young-very-smart-brothas-interview in Inverse (2019 Jun 4)

“Should the CIA stooge Guaido and his white supremacists grab power, it will be the 68th overthrow of a sovereign government by the United States, most of them democracies. A fire sale of Venezuela’s utilities and mineral wealth will surely follow, along with the theft of the country’s oil, as outlined by John Bolton. Under the last Washington-controlled government in Caracas, poverty reached historic proportions. There was no healthcare for those could not pay. There was no universal education; Mavis Mendez, and millions like her, could not read or write.”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

John Pilger, The War on Venezuela is Built on Lies, CounterPunch, https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/22/the-war-on-venezuela-is-built-on-lies/ (22 February 2019)

Democracy , Reading , Country , Wealth

“It really was harmful because it makes it feel for women, for LGBTQ folks, for even white men too, that there are only these tokens and that’s not the case. What it does is reinforce white supremacy, it reinforces patriarchy. It’s harmful to everyone, not just the people who are being erased.”

Blair Imani (1993) American activist

On how only certain historical figures are highlighted during celebratory months in “A Conversation with Blair Imani” https://www.readitforward.com/author-interview/a-conversation-with-blair-imani/ in Read It Forward

People , Making love , Feeling , Women

“Because of anti-blackness in the United States and Latin America, most of us are either hyper-visible or invisible, or both simultaneously. So many people I’ve had conversations with don’t even know that Latinxs are not a race or that black people exist in Puerto Rico (and throughout all of Latin America) and that we don’t all look exactly the same. As a light-skinned black Boricua, I’m often read as racially ambiguous, and because of colorism, I benefit from my proximity to whiteness. I think it’s our responsibility (those of us who benefit from light-skinned privilege or racial ambiguity or whiteness) to have a reckoning with race, to do the work to actively address institutional racism, as well as racism and colorism in our everyday lives, not just in the public eye. Otherwise, we are complicit.”

Jaquira Díaz Puerto Rican writer

On racism and being lighter-skinned in “‘Either Hyper-Visible or Invisible’: An Interview with Jaquira Díaz” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/either-hyper-visible-or-invisible-an-interview-with-jaquira-diaz/ in Los Angeles Review of Books (2019 Oct 29)

Reading , Light , People , Thinking

“It was just noon that Saturday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.”

William Faulkner book Intruder in the Dust

The opening sentence of the novel, Ch. 1
Intruder in the Dust (1948)

Night

“This Delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which is which nor cares…. No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

Delta Autumn (p. 347)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

Time , Night , Wealth , People

“There are so many stories to tell — we’re just as varied in experiences as white men, and it doesn’t look like people are sick of those stories yet. And I’m lucky enough to be in a position to tell these stories and share them.”

Maurene Goo

On being able to tell different stories about the Korean American experience in “’So Many Stories to Tell’: A Conversation with Maurene Goo” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/so-many-stories-to-tell-a-conversation-with-maurene-goo/ in Los Angeles Review of Books (2018 Aug 22)

People , Men

“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings. ...This means that they do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control. Rather, in this land of liberty, it is indisputable that current and former employees of the White House work for the People of the United States, and that they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Moreover, as citizens of the United States, current and former senior-level presidential aides have constitutional rights, including the right to free speech, and they retain these rights even after they have transitioned back into private life.”

Ketanji Brown Jackson (1970) United States District Judge

Reference note: See The Federalist No. 51 (James Madison); The Federalist No. 69 (Alexander Hamilton); 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 115–18...
Committee on the Judiary, United States House of Representatives, Plaintiff, v. Donald F. McGahn II, Defendant. (Nov 25, 2019)

Life , Housing , History , Past

“I just feel left out of the whole possibility of love and romance. I hate that that is related to my race, and I hate that I believe it. I hate that I have felt it for so long, and I hate that white women have it so easy. And it’s not that they are all beautiful or interesting—their face could look like a piece of paper, but there is a cultural perspective skewed towards them. We are asked to compare ourselves to them.”

Morgan Parker (writer) American poet

On her feelings about romance in “Morgan Parker: ‘In the back of my mind I’m on a slave ship, yet I’m also here just telling you how it is.’” https://www.guernicamag.com/miscellaneous-files-interview-morgan-parker/ in Guernica Magazine (2019 Mar 22)

Hate , Beauty , Relation ships , Love

“The white woman must cohabit with members of the dark races, white men with black women. Thus the white race will disappear, for the mixing of the dark with white means the end of the white man, and our most dangerous enemy will become only a memory.”

Nahum Rabinovitch (1928–2020) Israeli rabbi

originally attributed in 1952 to an "Emanuel" Rabinovitch, who appears to be a fictional creation of Eustace Mullins
Misattributed

Memory , Women , Men

“Negro poverty is unique is every way. It grows out of a long American history, and it expresses itself in a subculture that is buit up on an interlocking base of economic and racial injustice. It is a fact imposed from without, from white America.”

Michael Harrington book The Other America

Source: The Other America (1962), Ch. 2

Way , History

“When I left South Texas, I realized that I became the other. I was the token of the room. Most of my friends were white so when I went to a party or a wedding or a work function, I would scan the room and only see my face in the people who were serving the drinks or passing around the appetizers. I realized I was the hanging fruit in the room, the living and breathing statue in the room, the object in the middle of the photograph, surrounded by white eyes.”

Mando Alvarado actor

On one of the inspirations behind his play Living Sculpture in “SIN MUROS: INTERVIEW WITH “LIVING SCULPTURE” PLAYWRIGHT MANDO ALVARADO” https://thetheatretimes.com/sin-muros-interview-living-sculpture-playwright-mando-alvarado/ in The Theatre Times

Drink , Wedding , People

“To see brown bodies in this environment was exciting to me…Rural upstate New York could be anywhere in middle America…The parents being from Brooklyn, and Pop having Puerto Rican heritage, and the mom being white, makes it a quintessential American story.”

Raúl Castillo (1977) American actor, writer

On his role in the film We the Animals in “After ‘Looking’ and ‘We the Animals,’ Raul Castillo Is Ready to Be a Movie Star” https://www.indiewire.com/2019/01/raul-castillo-interview-we-the-animals-looking-1202029967/ in IndieWire (2019 Jan 2)

Making love , Parent , Moms

“Fact: the solution to the problems in tech is not more tech. Especially not more tech written by privileged, heads-in-the-sand white dudes.”

Coraline Ada Ehmke technologist, activist, and transgender feminist

https://twitter.com/coralineada/status/1029162264979546112

Problem

“Nine thousand three hundred and eighty-eight young Americans rest beneath the white crosses and Stars of David arrayed on these beautiful grounds. Each one has been adopted by a French family that thinks of him as their own. They come from all over France to look after our boys. They kneel. They cry. They pray. They place flowers. And they never forget. Today America embraces the French people and thanks you for honoring our beloved dead. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2019, June, Remarks on the 75th Anniversary of D-Day in Colleville-sur-Mer, France

Family , Dead , Forgetting , Beauty

“The hardest thing about being a black writer in this town is having to pitch your black story to white execs…Also, most of the time when we go into rooms to pitch, there’s one token black executive that sometimes can be a friend and sometimes can be a foe. I wonder if they think it makes me more comfortable, if that makes me think that they’re a woke network or studio because they’ve got that one black exec. It feels patronizing. I’m not against a black exec. I want there to be more of them.”

Lena Waithe (1984) American actress, producer, and screenwriter

On the still existing obstacles to pitching ideas in “Lena Waithe Is Changing the Game” https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/03/lena-waithe-cover-story in Vanity Fair (April 2018)

Thinking , Time , Feeling , Making love

“The white races did, of course, give some things to the natives, and they were the worst gifts that they could possibly have made, those plagues of our own modern world-materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism and syphilis. For the rest, since these peoples possessed qualities of their own which were superior to anything we could offer them, they have remained essentially unchanged.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Where imposition by force was attempted, the results were even more disastrous, and common sense, realizing the futility of such measures, should preclude any recourse to their introduction. One solitary success must be conceded to the colonizers: everywhere they have succeeded in arousing hatred, a hatred that urges these peoples, awakened from their slumbers by us, to rise and drive us out. Indeed, it looks almost as though they had awakened solely and simply for that purpose! Can anyone assert that colonization has increased the number of Christians in the world? Where are those conversions en masse which mark the success of Islam? Here and there one finds isolated islets of Christians, Christians in name, that is, rather than by conviction; and that is the sum total of the successes of this magnificent Christian religion, the guardian of supreme Truth! Taking everything into consideration, Europe's policy of colonization has ended in a complete failure.
7 February 1945.
Disputed, The Testament of Adolf Hitler (1945)

World , People , Alcohol

“Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

Sleep , Question , Water , Way

“With that, she gathered her blanket around her elbows and ascended the lily-white stairs like a bride. Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter staars seemed permanent.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

Peace , Winter

“So why fret and care that the actual version of the destined deed was done by an upper class English gentleman who had circumnavigated the globe as a vigorous youth, lost his dearest daughter and his waning faith at the same time, wrote the greatest treatise ever composed on the taxonomy of barnacles, and eventually grew a white beard, lived as a country squire just south of London, and never again traveled far enough even to cross the English Channel? We care for the same reason that we love okapis, delight in the fossil evidence of trilobites, and mourn the passage of the dodo. We care because the broad events that had to happen, happened to happen in a certain particular way.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

And something unspeakably holy—I don't know how else to say this—underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also, in realms of contingency, assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know, and not in any one of a trillion other ways, nearly all of which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the cruelty, the fascination, and the mystery.
Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1342

Faith , Time , Country , Daughters

“I am the white woman character, black woman character. I am the black man character, the white man character…I have to stand in that person’s shoes.”

Suzan-Lori Parks (1963) American writer

On embodying every one of her characters in “Pulitzer Prize Winner Suzan-Lori Parks Questions ‘Woke-ness’ With Her Latest Off-Broadway Play” http://www.playbill.com/article/pulitzer-prize-winner-suzan-lori-parks-questions-woke-ness-with-her-latest-off-broadway-play in Playbill (2019 Mar 1)

Personality , Shoe

“Education has paralleled the life of prospering white America: it has been characterized by reverence for efficiency, cultivation of competence unattended by concern for aim, big white lies, and the mainly successful blackout of Black life.”

June Jordan (1936–2002) Poet, essayist, playwright, feminist and bisexual activist

Source: Black Studies: Bringing Back The Person (1969), p. 49

Education , Life , Success

“Nothing ever stops me. Certainly coming into Hollywood, I knew that there would be certain limitations. But I also couldn’t play a woman or I couldn’t play a white hero. To play Asian and to speak with accents because I speak Japanese, it never really bothered me. All I always look for in every piece is how can I use this piece to move to the next step? So the worst thing about playing Asian bad guys would be to not be remembered…”

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (1950) American actor

On being undaunted as an actor in “Comic-Con 2001: An Interview With Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa” http://fanboyplanet.com/comic-con-2001-an-interview-with-cary-hiroyuki-tagawa/ in Fanboy Planet (2001 Jul 27)

Bad luck , Guy

“The poor Negro always remembered himself as an ex-slave and used this as the basis of any dealings with the mainstream of American society. The middle class black man bases his whole existence on the hopeless hypothesis that no one is supposed to remember that for almost three hundred years there was slavery in America, that the white man was a master, the black man a slave. This knowledge, however, is at the root of the legitimate black culture of this country. It is this knowledge, with its attendant muses of self-division, self-hatred, stoicism, and finally quixotic optimism, that informs the most meaningful of Afro-American music.”

Amiri Baraka book Blues People

Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), p. 136

Optimism , Country , Music , Self-confidence

“One of the most persistent traits of of the Western white man has always been his fanatical and almost instinctive assumption that his systems and ideas about the world are the most desirable, and further that people who do not aspire to to them, or at least think them admirable, are savages or enemies.”

Amiri Baraka book Blues People

The idea that Western thought might be exotic if viewed from another landscape never presents itself to most Westerners.
Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), p. 8

World , Idea , Thinking , People

“Venezuela has been subjected to permanent political aggression. On September 8th, the New York Times published an article evidencing the participation of officials of the White House and the government of the United States, in meetings to bring about a military coup and cause a change of government, a change of regime in Venezuela. The investigation published by the New York Times – replicated by the Times magazine, the Washington Post and the world press – simply confirmed the conspiracy, the permanent aggression by factors of the government of the United States against a constitutional and strengthened democracy; a democracy supported by the people, such as the Venezuelan democracy…”

Nicolás Maduro (1962) 53rd President of Venezuela

President Maduro's speech at the United Nations General Assembly (excerpts), 26 September 2018

Democracy , Time , Housing , Support

“It’s a political war of the American empire, of the interests of the extreme right that today governs, of the Ku Klux Klan that rules over the White House, to take over Venezuela.”

Nicolás Maduro (1962) 53rd President of Venezuela

Venezuelan President Maduro Says Trump Admin Run by KKK, Democracy Now, https://www.democracynow.org/2019/2/13/headlines/venezuelan_president_maduro_says_trump_admin_run_by_kkk(13 February 2019)

War , Housing

“Trump does not just fan the flames of violence with his rhetoric, he also provides legitimation to a number of white nationalists and right-wing extremist groups who are emboldened by his words and actions and too often ready to translate their hatred into the desecration of synagogues, schools, and other public sites, as well as engage in violence against peaceful protesters, and in some cases commit heinous acts of violence.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

Interview with Media For Us, 2019

School , Peace

“Fascism begins with the rhetoric of dehumanization, humiliation, and reification, right? It starts with the language of brutality, which it normalizes. It legitimates hatred and racism and violence. It views certain groups through rhetoric as enemies of the American people. It operates off of the rhetoric of war, anti-intellectualism, and white supremacy. It operates off of the language of disposability. That language doesn’t just simply normalize increasingly the notions of white nationalism, white supremacy, racism, and xenophobia; it also enacts policies and it creates a culture of utter stupidity, a culture of ignorance. And, unfortunately, it functions so as to enable violence against groups labeled as dangerous, other, excess, and a threat to the whitewashed notion of citizenship.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

Interview with Media For Us, 2019

War , People , Stupidity

“When we look back over the course of our nation’s history, what we see again and again almost like clockwork are these predictable efforts by the wealthy elite to use race as a wedge. To pit poor whites against poor people of color for the benefit of the ruling elite. Many people don’t realize that even slavery as an institution—the emergence of an all-Black system of slavery—was to a large extent the result of plantation owners deliberately trying to pit poor whites against poor Blacks. And ensure that poor whites would not join in any kind of resistance, movement, struggle, or revolt with poor Blacks…”

Michelle Alexander (1967) American lawyer, civil rights activist and writer

On the elite’s influence on the poor in in “The struggle for racial justice has a long way to go” https://isreview.org/issue/84/struggle-racial-justice-has-long-way-go in the International Socialist Review (May 2012)

Color , People , History , Effort

“We have to be clear that while antisemitism is a threat to Jews everywhere, it is also a threat to democratic governance itself. The antisemites who marched in Charlottesville don’t just hate Jews. They hate the idea of multiracial democracy. They hate the idea of political equality. They hate immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ people, women, and anyone else who stands in the way of a whites-only America. They accuse Jews of coordinating a massive attack on white people worldwide, using people of color and other marginalized groups to do their dirty work.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

2010s, 2019, November 2019

Democracy , Hate , People , Color

“Yes, do as you would be done by—and not to the dark man and the white woman alone, but to the sorrel horse and the gray squirrel as well; not to creatures of your own anatomy only, but to all creatures. You cannot go high enough nor low enough nor far enough to find those whose bowed and broken beings will not rise up at the coming of the kindly heart, or whose souls will not shrink and darken at the touch of inhumanity. Live and let live. Do more. Live and help live. Do to beings below you as you would be done by beings above you.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Pity the tortoise, the katydid, the wild-bird, and the ox. Poor, undeveloped, untaught creatures! Into their dim and lowly lives strays of sunshine little enough, though the fell hand of man be never against them. They are our fellow-mortals. They came out of the same mysterious womb of the past, are passing through the same dream, and are destined to the same melancholy end, as we ourselves. Let us be kind and merciful to them.
"Conclusion", pp. 327–328
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Horse , Soul , Help , Heart

“In their phenomena of life the inhabitants of the earth display endless variety. They swim in the waters, soar in the skies, squeeze among the rocks, clamber among the trees, scamper over the plains, and glide among the grounds and grasses. Some are born for a summer, some for a century, and some flutter their little lives out in a day. They are black, white, blue, golden, all the colours of the spectrum. Some are wise and some are simple; some are large and some are microscopic; some live in castles and some in bluebells; some roam over continents and seas, and some doze their little day-dream away on a single dancing leaf. But they are all the children of a commion mother and the co-tenants of a common world. Why they are here in this world rather than some place else; why the world in which they find themselves is so full of the undesirable; and whether it would not have been better if the ball on which they ride and riot had been in the beginning sterilised, are problems too deep and baffling for the most of them. But since they are here, and since they are too proud or too superstitious to die, and are surrounded by such cold and wolfish immensities, what would seem more proper than for them to be kind to each other, and helpful, and dwell together as loving and forbearing members of One Great Family?”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Conclusion", pp. 324–325
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

Family , Tree , Sea , Making love

“Look at the manner in which the aborigines are swept away from continent after continent by the sword and beverage of the Aryans. See how the red children of America have been cheated and debauched and driven from homes where they and their fathers had lived from immemorial generations. When the banner of Castile first furled in Bahama breezes, America was inhabited by a noble, magnanimous, and happy people. They were not like the sodden, suspicious, revengeful remnants that to-day huddle on barricaded reserves, the vindictive survivors of four centuries of injustice. They were kind and generous. They came to the invading Europeans as children, with minds of wonder and with hands filled with presents. They were treated by the invaders like refuse. They were plundered, and their outstretched hands cut off and fed to Spanish hounds. They are gone from the valleys where once their camp-smokes curled to heaven, and their quaint canoes ruffle the moonlight of the rivers no more. They that remain are too weak to rise in warlike challenge to the aggressions of the mighty white. But the story of the meeting of the pale and the red, and of the wrongs of the vanquished red, will remain as one of the mournful tales of this world when the kindred of Lo, like fleecy clouds, have melted into the infinite azure of the past.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, p. 133–134

Home , Cheating , Past , Children

“Only the news concerning Black people made any impact at all on me. And it seemed that each year the news got worse. The first of the really bad news that i remember was Montgomery, Alabama. That was when i first heard of Martin Luther King. Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white woman. The Black people boycotted the buses. It was a nasty struggle. Black people were harassed and attacked and, if i remember correctly, Martin Luther King’s house was bombed. Then came Little Rock. I can still remember those ugly, terrifying white mobs attacking those little children who were close to my own age. When the news about Little Rock came on, you could hear a pin drop at my house. We would all sit there horrified. Sometimes, afterward, somebody would say something, but usually we would just sit there lost in our own thoughts. I guess there was nothing to say. And each year i would sit in front of that box, watching my people being attacked by white mobs, being bitten by dogs, beaten and water-hosed by police, arrested and murdered. Then the news seemed too real.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

Source: Assata: In Her Own Words, p. 73

Housing , Bad luck , Dogs , Children

“The more i watched how boys and girls behaved, the more i read and the more i thought about it, the more convinced i became that this behavior could be traced directly back to the plantation, when slaves were encouraged to take the misery of their lives out on each other instead of on the master. The slavemasters taught us we were ugly, less than human, unintelligent, and many of us believed it. Black people became breeding animals: studs and mares. A Black woman was fair game for anyone at any time: the master or a visiting guest or any redneck who desired her. The slavemaster would order her to have six with this stud, seven with that stud, for the purpose of increasing his stock. She was considered less than a woman. She was a cross between a whore and a workhorse. Black men internalized the white man’s opinion of Black women. And, if you ask me, a lot of us still act like we’re back on the plantation with massa pulling the strings.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

Source: Assata: In Her Own Words, Ch.6, pp. 176-177

Time , Reading , Whore , Girl

“Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Joe Biden Says ‘Poor Kids’ Are Just as Bright as ‘White Kids’, The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/politics/joe-biden-poor-kids.html (9 August 2019)
2019

“We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’ I don’t buy that.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Quoted by Norman Solomon in Here Comes Joe Biden and It's Worse Than You Thought,Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/03/11/here-comes-joe-biden-and-its-worse-you-thought (11 March 2019)
2019

“We must boldly go out and attack the white Western world at its power centers. The white Christian churches are another form of government in this country, and they are used by the government of this country to exploit the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa.”

James Forman (1928–2005) American civil rights leader

Source: "The Black Manifesto" (1969), p. 125

World , People , Country

“White people in this country must be willing to accept black leadership, for that is the only protection that black people have to protect ourselves from racism rising again in this country. Racism in the United States is so pervasive in the mentality of whites that only an armed, well-disciplined, black-controlled Government can insure the stamping out of racism in this country.”

James Forman (1928–2005) American civil rights leader

Source: "The Black Manifesto" (1969), p. 118

People , Country

“Sorry, just very very briefly, the Germans were in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led Communism. And Jewish-led Communism had wiped out tens of millions of white Christians in Russia and they were afraid of the same thing. And there was this wild overreaction and all this kind of stuff.”

Stefan Molyneux (1966) libertarian philosopher, writer, speaker, and online broadcaster

Describing the Holocaust, "Migratory Patterns of Predatory Immigrants" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2RVIi6M7oM, YouTube (March 20, 2016), @4:45

Communication

“Huey P. Newton is the baddest motherfucker ever to set foot inside of history. Huey has a very special meaning to black people, because for four hundred years black people have been wanting to do exactly what Huey Newton did, that is, to stand up in front of the most deadly tentacle of the white racist power structure, and to defy that deadly tentacle, and to tell that tentacle that he will not accept the aggression and the brutality, and that if he is moved against, he will retaliate in kind. Huey Newton is a classical revolutionary figure.”

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) American activist

Post-Prison Writings (1969)
1960s

People , History

“I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

Dylann Roof (1994) American mass murderer

archived 20 June 2015 https://web.archive.org/web/20150620135047/http://lastrhodesian.com/data/documents/rtf88.txt on website registered 9 February 2015, published 21 June 2015 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/us/dylann-storm-roof-photos-website-charleston-church-shooting.html in NYT, original date of authorship unknown

World , Fight , Time , Country

“I was never threatened…I never knew anyone who was lynched. But there was subtle racism every day of my life. You could not speak to a white man unless he spoke to you first. On the sidewalk, I’d have to move so a white person could walk by.”

Ernest J. Gaines (1933–2019) Novelist, short story writer, teacher

On his experiences with segregation (as quoted in “Ernest J. Gaines: A Great American Author Pays It Forward to a New Generation of Black Writers” https://www.theroot.com/ernest-j-gaines-a-great-american-author-pays-it-forwa-1790858566 in The Root; 2015 Jan 22)

Personality , Life

“You could as soon as scrub the blackamore white, as to change the principles of a profest Democrat; and that he will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the Government of this Country.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources 1745-1799, Vol. 36, August 4, 1797-October 28, 1798 https://books.google.com/books?id=x4GyAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA474#v=onepage&q&f=false (letter written, 30 September 1798, Mount Vernon) p. 474
1790s

Change , Country

“The landing of the white man on Madagascar inflicted injury without measure. The consequences of that irruption of Europeans onto Madagascar were not psychological alone, since, as every authority has observed, there are inner relationships between consciousness and the social context.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), p. 97

“I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. If I am black, it is not the result of a curse, but it is because, having offered my skin, I have been anle to absorb all the cosmic efflucia.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

I am truly a ray of sunlight under the earth...
Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Ch. 2

Understanding , Intelligence , Heart , Music

“A white man addressing a Negro behaves exactly like an adult with a child and starts smirking, whispering, patronizing, cozening. It is not one white man I have watched, but hundreds; and I have not limited my investigation to any one class but, if I may claim an essentially objective position, I have made a point of observing such behavior in physician, policemen, employers.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), pp. 31

Behavior

“What is there to say? Purely and simply this: When a bachelor of philosophy from Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the ground of his color. I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. Wren one else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men, I say that intelligence has never saved anyone; and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), p. 28-29

Teachers , Intelligence , Color , Men

“Our identity as a nation — unlike many other nations — is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood. Being an American involves the embrace of high ideals and civic responsibility. We become the heirs of Thomas Jefferson by accepting the ideal of human dignity found in the Declaration of Independence. We become the heirs of James Madison by understanding the genius and values of the U. S. Constitution. We become the heirs of Martin Luther King, Jr., by recognizing one another not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. This means that people of every race, religion, and ethnicity can be fully and equally American. It means that bigotry or white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed. And it means that the very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation… Self-correction is the secret strength of freedom. We are a nation with a history of resilience and a genius for renewal.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Remarks at Bush Institute Summit, "The Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In The World" at the Bush Institute Summit in New York City https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2YlVZxu_L0 (October 2017), as quoted in The Washington Post http://archive.is/jl9AF#selection-2115.0-2135.112 (October 2017)
2010s, 2017

Religion , History , Freedom , Understanding

“Unfortunately, Christianity in India has been inextricably mixed up for the last one hundred years with the British rule. It appears to us as synonymous with the materialistic civilization and imperialistic exploitation by the strong white races of the weaker races of the world. Its contribution to India has been therefore largely of a negative character. It has done some good in spite of its professors. It has shocked us into setting our own house in order.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works, Volume 40. New Delhi. 1970, pp. 58-59. as quoted in Goel, S.R. History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)
Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

World , Strong , Appearance , Housing

“More than two million people in the United States are behind bars, a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world, constituting a new Jim Crow. The total population in prison is nearly equal to the number of people in Houston, Texas, the fourth largest U. S. city. African Americans and Latinos make up 56 percent of those incarcerated, while constituting only about 32 percent of the U. S. population. Nearly 50 percent of American adults, and a much higher percentage among African Americans and Native Americans, have an immediate family member who has spent or is currently spending time behind bars. Both black men and Native American men in the United States are nearly three times, Hispanic men nearly two times, more likely to die of police shootings than white men. Racial divides are now widening across the entire planet.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?, 2019

Family , Time , Country , People

“Deaths now outnumber births among white people in more than half the states in the country. Much of this is low birth rates and white men dying from substance abuse and suicide. Our life expectancy has declined for 3 years. We need to do much more.”

Andrew Yang (1975) American entrepreneur

15 February 2019 https://twitter.com/andrewyangvfa/status/1096442292527874048

Life , Country , Birth , People

“We are black, it is true, but tell us, gentle men, you who are so judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man?”

Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803) Leader of the Haitian Revolution

Letter to the General Assembly (1792)

Law , Men

“At Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Fernandina, St. Augustine, and Jacksonville, the blacks may remain in their chosen or accustomed vocations; but on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority, and the acts of Congress. By the laws of war, and orders of the President of the United States, the negro is free, and must be dealt with as such.”

William T. Sherman (1820–1891) American General, businessman, educator, and author.

He cannot be subjected to conscription, or forced military service, save by the written orders of the highest military authority of the department, under such regulations as the President or Congress may prescribe. Domestic servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, and other mechanics, will be free to select their own work and residence, but the young and able-bodied negroes must be encouraged to enlist as soldiers in the service of the United States, to contribute their share toward maintaining their own freedom, and securing their rights as citizens of the United States.
1860s, 1865, Special Field Order No. 15 (January 1865)

War , People , Law , Personality

“There is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness which comes over persons who are trapped or imprisoned, when all their efforts to attract attention and assistance bring no response. This is the kind of feeling which you in Walsall and we in Wolverhampton are experiencing in the face of the continued flow of immigration into our towns. We are of course in a minority – make no mistake about that. Out of over 600 parliamentary constituencies perhaps less than 60 are affected in any way like ourselves. The rest know little or nothing and, we might sometimes be tempted to feel, care little or nothing. Only this week a colleague of mine in the House of Commons was dumbfounded when I told him of a constituent whose little daughter was now the only white child in her class at school. He looked at me as if I were a Member of Parliament for central Africa, who had suddenly dropped from the sky into Westminster. So far as most people in the British Isles are concerned, you and I might as well be living in central Africa for all they know about our circumstances.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Walsall (9 February 1968), quoted in Still to Decide (Elliot Right Way Books, 1972), p. 290
1960s

School , Housing , Personality , Daughters

“He’d grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.”

William Gibson book Mona Lisa Overdrive

Source: Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Ch. 2

Hate

“Black folks are descendants of slaves that were imported, quote-unquote by slave owners, to the United States for the explicit purpose of cultivating crops. And it was predicated on white supremacy and racial superiority, but we have to understand that white supremacy exists for a reason, and they exist for a very specific cultural and economic reasons. And LBJ talked about this — like, if you can convince a poor white man that he’s superior to a black man, he’ll empty his pockets for you. And so it’s not just economic reasons why racism exists but there are economic reasons why racism is perpetuated and incentivized. More of that’s housing, income, et cetera. And like I said on Monday with Ta-Nehisi, until America tells the truth about itself we’re never going to heal. And this — it’s like this thing that as a culture we hide… it’s like this big wound with a big ugly scab on it, and it’s just going to stay this itchy thing that we keep going back to until we just deal with it.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) American politician

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her First Weeks In Washington, The Intercept https://theintercept.com/2019/01/28/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-podcast/ (28 January 2019)
Quotes (2019)

Truth , Understanding , Housing , Quotes

“Automation…the White Death…deindustrilization. Trump throws bombast and bluster at the problem. Andrew Yang sees the problem for what it is and offers understanding, sympathy, and solutions. Everyone should take this man and his ideas seriously.”

Richard Bertrand Spencer (1978) American white supremacist

23 November 2018 https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1066238599253843968 regarding Andrew Yang, highlighted 11 March 2019 by Vox https://www.vox.com/2019/3/11/18256198/andrew-yang-gang-presidential-policies-universal-basic-income-joe-rogan and 10 April 2019 by Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/andrew-yang-4chan-alt-right/
2018

Idea , Problem , Death , Understanding

“What the world (and particularly the White House) needs to remember is that aggression is unleashed and escalated when one party to a dispute decides for itself who is guilty and how he is to be punished.”

I. F. Stone (1907–1989) American investigative journalist and author

NPR: Excerpt: The Best of I.F. Stone (5 September 2006)

World , Housing

“America is not like a blanket -- one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt: many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt.”

Jesse Jackson (1941) African-American civil rights activist and politician

Address to the Democratic National Convention, 1984

Peace , Clothes , Color , Making love

“It was one of those winter days in Los Angeles when the wind has swept away the smog and the air is clear and the light still and everything has the immediacy of a dream. I parked on a street called Overland in the Hollywood Hills. It was lined with white-skinned birch trees. Their nude branches shimmered against the sky. Tattered yellow leaves clogged the gutters and the air was scented with the rainy smell of eucalyptus. There were no cars on the street and the houses were barely visible behind walls and fences and sweeping lawns that had never been trod upon except by gardeners.”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Goldenboy (1988), p.132

Tree , Housing , Light , Dreams

“Those could be the famous last words of a one-term president, having wildly underestimated the public appetite for transformative action on the triple crises of our time: imminent ecological unraveling, gaping economic inequality (including the racial and gender wealth divide), and surging white supremacy.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn on the Green New Deal, The Intercept, https://theintercept.com/2019/02/13/green-new-deal-proposal/ (13 February 2019)

Wealth , Time