Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

Racism is so extreme and so pervasive in our American society that no black individual lives in an atmosphere of freedom.

One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black. It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States... A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn't stand it anymore... I felt liberated in Paris.

I think really the whole problem with racism and its continuing legacy in this country is that we simply love it. Who would we be without the 'struggle?'

I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.

Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

When you're white, the sky's the limit. When you're black, the limit's the sky.

If one lives in a country where racism is held valid and practiced in all ways of life eventually, no matter whether one is a racist or a victim, one comes to feel the absurdity of life....Racism generated from whites is first of all absurd. Racism creates absurdity among blacks as a defense mechanism.

It's almost impossible to separate the actions, or it's also, it's almost impossible to separate the oppression and exploitation, criminal oppression and criminal exploitation of the American negro from the color of the skin of the person who is the oppressor or the exploiter.

It's getting almost so bad a colored man hasn't got any country.

See, the Black man gotta fly to get to something the white man can walk to.

It would be the easiest thing in the world for the white man to destroy all Black Muslims.

I think that what people have failed to talk about is white supremacy.

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.

For their abuse of [the Black African] race, the whites will be cursed, unless they repent.

I am not an American; I am one of twenty-two million black people who are victims of Americanism.

It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.

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.

It's very easy for one talking about violence and hatred for the white man to appeal to [Negro from ghetto]. I have never thought of this, but I think this is quite true, that if, even if you talk to them about nonviolence from a tactical point of view, they can't quite see it because they don't even know they're outnumbered.

The issue of racism and racial prejudice. It is very, very difficult to discuss. It is difficult to discuss the issue of apartheid. Many have made the observation that it is very difficult to find anyone in SA who ever supported apartheid because everyone was opposed, it was against our will and so on.

America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'

Still, it's clear that there are lots of people out there who are uncomfortable [about racism]. The Civil War was a long time ago but there are aspects of it that remain unsettled.

Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

All of this in [Donald] Trump now has become so overt that it's difficult when we talk about repression not to talk about white supremacy, not to talk about its legacy, from slavery to lynching to mass incarceration, and what it has developed into.