Mary Kingsley Quotes

It is sometimes maintained that racial mixture is biologically undesirable. There is no evidence whatever for this view. Nor is there, apparently, any reason to think that Negroes are congenitally less intelligent than white people, but as to that it will be difficult to judge until they have equal scope and equally good social conditions.

I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.

If white America is ready to extend complete democratic rights to colored people, there will be no race, no racial tension and no racial prejudice on either side, but we can be sure that any movement 'back to normalcy' in race relations will be bitterly resisted by colored people. It is now up to white America to make its choice...

To be American in the United States means to be white, protestant, and very rich. This excludes almost entirely black people and anyone else who can be easily identified.

It is one of the peculiar phases of Anglo-Saxon conceit to refuse to believe that every black man does not want to be white.

Your not black enough. If you are black, all you have to do is wear a dashiki and pump your fist, and you’ll get all the money you want.

The black herring of intermarriage has been dragged too often across the trail to justice. 'Would you want your sister to marry a nigger?' is still the question that is supposed to stun any white man who sponsors rights for Negroes. It stirs Negroes to ironic laughter, although on all levels they recognize the white man's fear of intermarriage as deep seated…

This problem, which exists because of the presence of … Negroes in this country, can be permanently solved only by the physical separation of the races or by resigning ourselves to total mongrelization resulting in the destruction of both the white and black races

I found everywhere now the most direct antagonism between the two classes. The whites charge generally that the negro is idle, and at the bottom of all local disturbances, and credit him with most of the vices and very few of the virtues of humanity. The negroes charge that the whites are revengeful, and intend to cheat the laboring class at every opportunity, and credit them with neither good purposes nor kindly hearts..

In the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black office seekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal chief, a foreign Muslim — in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to be our president — is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never brought against any of his predecessors.

Modern technical civilization does not seem to be as well handled by the black man as by the white man in the United States

What right do white racist, who believe their race is superior, have for complaining about black racists, who see something special in their own race? What right do black racists, who see a special character in their race, have for complaining about white racists?

It’s a sordid business this divvying us up by race.

What whites cannot experience and may never understand is that no matter which side of the bed I chose to wake up on, I would still be a black man in the racially divisive America.

The intellectual and moral character of the European is deteriorated by the mixture of black or red blood.

The interests of the white working class have often been used by white political elites to stave off challenges to inequality and discrimination by black folk and other minority groups.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

I am acquainted with many Negro poets, contractors, labor leaders, journalists, social workers, physicians, novelists ... It does not strike me as strange that Negroes should be doing all sorts of work. But white people continue to be amazed when they hear of Negroes having such vocations, They regard successful Negroes as freaks, along with trained seals, and infant chess prodigies. .

In the combat between the emerging Negroes of the South and the ruling white trash, I sympathize greatly with the Negro.

Stated briefly, the problem confronting the colored peoples of the world is how to live in freedom, peace and security without being invaded, subjugated, expropriated, persecuted and humiliated by Caucasians justifying their actions by the myth of racial superiority..

I don't think that the country is ever ready to have the conversation about race.

Afro-Caribbean and African immigrants are seeking to attain elevated minority status by remaining perpetual outsiders and forever foreign so not to every fully incorporate themselves into the black American populace.

To suppose that the races of Africa are in any sense the equals of men of European descent, so far as government, as society, as the higher interests of civilization are concerned, is really, I think, an absurdity.

The respective classes of inhabitants began to feel that they had equal rights, and as the coloured population so far exceeded the white, the safety of the latter was threatened.

I doubted that the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical coon who blacks my shoes every morning was fit for citizenship.