Margo Jefferson Quotes

In America, a black man has to feel like he's God just to make it a little bit when white people can just feel human. They can just be themselves, but for me, I feel we have to start instilling that back into our people. That pride. That black power. That privilege to be alive.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

There's sort of a persistent misperception that talking about race is black folk's burden. Ultimately, only men can end sexism, and only white people can end racism.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

White middle- and upper-class men have a longer journey to go than many people.

Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.

We need Black supremacy to get Negroes off their knees in churches that preach a white heaven, a white God and a white universe.

A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

The color of your skin is your uniform in this ultimate battle for the survival of the West.

The American paradigm of race requires that there be an ‘other’ - and the other is Black people. That's what makes white people, white.

Segregation is a disease of white people, not of colored people.

The real unifying force in American political life is whiteness, no matter its party, gender, region or, at times, even its class.

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.

I have an upfront, sort of in-the-trenches knowledge of white people's trying to avoid their whiteness and replace it with something else. When I met my wife, we went through the whole race-slash-ethnicity conversation, and she told me she was Italian. Later on, I find out she's a quarter Italian, at best.

If white people on a larger scale really de-emphasized their whiteness, I think that would have to transform the Republican party into a more responsible party that couldn't get by on just playing into white resentment, especially white middle and working class resentment while taking care of the interests of plutocrats.

Obviously, race is the elephant in the room, and we all understand that. Unless it is talked about constantly, it's not going to get better... people have to be made to feel uncomfortable, and especially white people, because we're comfortable. We still have no clue what being born white means.

One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won't succeed.

In Maryland, I didn't grow up around poor white people. Where I grew up, the white people were middle class or upper-middle class. It's interesting how screwed up it is in reality, because most people who receive assistance from the government are white, but not in my head or in my experience.

There's this sense that whiteness is the default and does not need to be questioned. That you've got a race if you're black, or any kind of Asian, or any kind of Native American, but that you have no race if you are white.

The America that clings to Confederate statues and flags, and that jealously guards the social privileges white Americans have long enjoyed, form the stalwarts of Trump's base.

You can be poor, middle class, or rich - it doesn't matter. The black card will still confer upon you an entire history of oppression, even if you've never been oppressed. Flash the black card, and most white people will cower.

Most white people cannot answer the question, 'What does it mean to be white?' with any depth or complexity.

My mother had two unshakable beliefs that she tried to drill into me. The first was that I had to study and work twice as hard as my white peers if I wanted to survive in America, and the second was that it was delusional and dangerous to believe I possessed the same freedom white people had to pursue my dreams.

In America, mixed-race identity tends to invite both curiosity and suspicion, largely because few have found a way to interrogate it without centering whiteness as the scale by which to evaluate blackness.