Audre Lorde Quotes

This is the United States of America and unfortunately, race still matters to a lot of people. The evil head of racism doesn't hide, it sticks its head up.

... all Americans are the prisoners of racial prejudice.

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.

Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born.

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.

If I’d been talking about black trash, I might be lynched. If I was talking about white trash, I’d merely be another torchbearer in an ongoing national lynching.

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.

I look at racism as one of the social demons. And, in its worst, it's violent and it's a systemic commitment to oppression.

racism is alive and doing too well in America.

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

I think that one of the positions we have taken around the question of race, is that we already know. We know. We know. We know. And so we don't need to look at it again. And yet everybody is still upset. Everybody is still being driven by their outrageous imagination to the point of killing people because they feel that a black man in front of them is a demon, or the Incredible Hulk.

America's racist, so what do you expect.

As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.

Bigotry is surely an exportable American commodity, especially when it comes to race.

Until we have a serious discussion, this problem [racism] will continue to occur.

It is very discouraging to be in a team with white athletes. On the track you are Tommie Smith, the fastest man in the world, but once you are in the dressing rooms you are nothing more than a dirty Negro.

Race prejudice is the devil unchained.

If you're getting harassed, it's not helpful to know that racism has generally declined in America, when you're still experiencing it. That is a reality that we're still vulnerable to.

Racism is cruel and unjust. It cuts deep and lingers long in individual and community memories. And it is not a thing of the past....We all have a duty to do what we can to turn this around.

I'm hoping that somehow with songs like 'American Gold' there will be some kind of justice, and people just stop being so close-minded to where they're like, 'Oh, it's not race.' It's easy to say that when you're not black and you haven't experienced it.

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

When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone 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.

The haughty American nation ... makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a bootblack.

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.