Beto O'Rourke Quotes

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America

You know how I know I'm white? I can cry myself out of a parking ticket.

I want you to admit that there is such a thing as white privilege.

There's only one free person in this society, and he is white and male.

I definitely think the fact that I come from a multicultural background, my mother living life in a white skin and having white skin privilege from the time I was little, I was aware of that.

There's not a white man in this country who can say he never benefited from being white.

There are two separate systems in America. One for the privileged, and one for everybody else.

We have a lot of people that are oppressed. We have a lot of people that aren't treated equally, aren't given equal opportunities. Police brutality is a huge thing that needs to be addressed. There are a lot of issues that need to be talked about, need to be brought to life, and we need to fix those.

I'm not familiar particularly with Hillary Clinton's neighborhood, but I wish people were a little bit more curious about what we call privilege and about why it's there. Black people in this country have no choice but to be curious. We have to know. I wish folks would do a little bit more investigation.

It's easier, as a white person, to be silent about racial injustice. It's easier. On paper. But it's not easier on the whole, because injustice affects all of us, whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not.

I tell you what: I bet Jerry Jones would not trade places with a 75-year black man in Chicago. I bet Joel Klatt would not trade places with a 30-year old black guy from Chicago or Watts. I bet he wouldn't do that. You know why? It's great to know that I'm white and a male in America.

The journey of making 'Hidden Figures' has shown me the automatic privilege that all white men are afforded in America in 2017 and in any and every year before that.

Anti-black racism operates at a society-wide level and colludes in a seamless web of policies, practices, and beliefs to oppress and disempower black communities.

The truth is, no, we don't live in a post-racial state anywhere in America, and this is particularly true in Hollywood.

America in its entirety is segregationist and is racist. It's more camouflaged in the north, but it's the same thing.

It's almost like a lot of black people in America, a lot of young black men, are born with this cloud over their heads. It's their penitentiary cloud, this philosophy we all have, that it's harder for us.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

If I were white, I'd get less criticism.

Sometimes black people really want to hold onto our oppression - 'This is ours! This belongs to us.' You can't just talk about equality for somebody else. Let's pass it on. Let's pass it on to somebody else. At the end of the day, it is all about inequality.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

Seems to me that the institutions that function in this country are clearly racist, and that they're built upon racism.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.