Marcia L. Fudge Quotes

I am struck by how, walking down the street, I'm rarely made aware of my race, but that among journalists, race is absolutely massive.

Black players had an issue with Joe Torre. They weren't treated like everybody else. Even I got called out in a couple of meetings that I thought was unfair.

I'm used to being the only black guy. I've seriously walked onstage, looked out in the audience, 15,000 people - and I'm the only one in the place. It's no big deal. My whole career's been like that.

People always say, 'Oh, there haven't been many black champions,' but on the other hand, there are a whole lot of white people that never won a belt either.

In all my years in show business - on stage, clubs and TV shows - my audience has been 75 percent white. In Las Vegas and Atlantic City I look out at the crowd and only see a few black faces here and there. But I can't allow myself to be conscious of the race factor. I couldn't perform my best under those conditions.

When I first started out as a young journalist, I know that on at least two occasions, when I walked into a newsroom, I knew I was replacing the black person in that job.

I don't know how often white people look around and think, 'Wow, there's really a lot of white people here; we should fix that.' But I know black people often look around and think, 'Wow, I'm the only one here - why?'

In the public, it seems to be painted that when minorities get pregnant, they need to get abortions, especially when it comes to teen pregnancy. It's like, when black girls are pregnant, it's like a statistic, but when white girls get pregnant, they get a TV show.

There are some aspects of the story of 'Power' that clearly are about race in the sense that any one of us now who's black and was raised in this country was raised with a lie, which is, 'You can never be president.' That's not true.

The 'New York Times' is not reviewing books by non-white people.

On TV, as in life, white folks are allowed to make mistakes, but usually, black people aren't.

Oddly enough, Asians are a much smaller 'minority' than African Americans in this country. But because Asians are so successful, college admission officers don't feel sorry for them, so they are not a preferred 'minority.'

We have to deal with the way that race influences our criminal justice system.

I realized I'm a very, very white dancer.

Is it my fault that there is a stereotype that black people are not good swimmers? I know that's a joke, but somebody will say, 'I can't believe you would say that.' Well, first of all it's just a joke, and second of all if you watch the Olympics, black people win medals in jumping, running. They don't win any in swimming.

We think of Shots Fired as almost an autopsy of Ferguson that shows the events from every street in the house. And, in dealing with these two murders of a black victim and a white victim, we show the ways that communities and the media deal with victims differently based on race.

We are the in midst of a bipartisan moment as it relates to criminal justice reform and dealing with mass incarceration in America which disproportionately impacts the African-American community.

My honest opinion is that blacks have to fight much harder for their individuality than whites do.

Why is it that in this courtroom I face a white magistrate, am confronted by a white prosecutor and escorted into the dock by a white orderly? Can anyone honestly and seriously suggest that in this type of atmosphere the scales of justice are evenly balanced?

I've been reading about and writing about the Civil War period and it is so striking that slavery was never made right - [Abraham] Lincoln was killed, Reconstruction came along, and all of that inequity was frozen in place and carried forward rather smugly. So I think the burden is now upon us white people, to say that this systemic inequality offends us.

Reinvigorating the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, making sure that in our Department of Education, where we see evidence of black boys being suspended at substantially higher rates than white boys for the same behavior, in the absence of that kind of rigorous enforcement of the nondiscrimination principle, then the long-standing biases that I believe have weakened, but are still clearly present in our society, assert themselves in ways that usually disadvantage African Americans.

...The Court ...[recognizes]...the persistence of racial inequality and a majority's acknowledgement of Congress's authority to act affirmatively, not only to end discrimination, but also to counteract discrimination's lingering effects. Those effects, reflective of a system of racial caste [legal segregation and discrimination] only recently ended, are evident in our work places, markets, and neighborhoods. Job applicants with identical resumes, qualifications, and interview styles still experience different receptions, depending on their race.

I once did a - the first piece on Malcolm X that anyone had ever seen in the - white press.

No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid

Of course in this age of colorblindness, a time when we have supposedly moved "beyond race," we as a nation would feel very uncomfortable if only black people were sent to jail for drug offenses. We seem comfortable with 90 percent of the people arrested and convicted of drug offenses in some states being African American, but if the figure was 100 percent, the veil of colorblindness would be lost.