Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

You’ve got a reputation and it stinks….Since Detroit is more than 80 percent Black, it can’t be the white man’s fault. It’s not what he’s doing to you. It’s what you’re not doing.

Modern technical civilization does not seem to be as well handled by the black man as by the white man in the United States

There is a racist virus in the American blood stream...

Blacks' problems lie not in the heads of white people but rather in the wasted and incompletely fulfilled lives of too many black people.

It's more dangerous to be black in America...If you are a normal white American, the truth is you don't understand being black in America, and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk in a way that you have to be corrected.

To be American in the United States means to be white, protestant, and very rich. This excludes almost entirely black people and anyone else who can be easily identified.

Many white Americans resist relinquishing the sense of entitlement skin color has given them throughout our national history.

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

… white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture (of private discrimination and segregation) that has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.

This nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.

The average white person now feels that anti-white bias is a bigger problem than other forms of racial discrimination.

The interests of the white working class have often been used by white political elites to stave off challenges to inequality and discrimination by black folk and other minority groups.

The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent ... I would preserve for free white labor a fair country ... where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.

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

If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.

We live in a society that blames everybody else for what's wrong.

White folks, no matter how well-meaning or open-minded, have no true idea what it's like to be black in America. That's not a slam against white people or an accusation of latent bigotry. But the fact is that we all live in an Anglo-dominated society.

When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem.

So for a long time I closed my eyes to the possibility of America having a white voice.

I have nothing to do with racism in America; it was here when I got here.

The poor and minorities are disproportionately both crime's perpetrators and its victims. People are saddened when this happens but not surprised.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Clearly, the Obama presidency hasn't wiped out racial prejudices.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

Race in this country is still the elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss.