Amitava Kumar Quotes

The history of racial violence in our country is both omnipresent and unspoken. It is a smog that surrounds us that few will admit is there.

With black people, there are 50 Hitlers over the course of history.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.

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.

The racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder really, unless the victim is white... blacks knew that white blood is the coin of freedom in a land where for four hundred years black blood has been shed unremarked and with impunity.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching.

These barbarities [American lynchings] have found many apologists, on the ground that the negroes are licentious and dishonest--as, indeed, many of them are. But who set them the example, and educated them in these vices? In too many cases the white population, and even their legal authorities.

I would not use the influence of my office to deter citizens from punishing that nigger brute. I would have gladly resigned as governor and gone to Honea Path and led the mob myself.

Slavery was our original sin. Race, our continuing dilemma.

One hundred years ago the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin…. The negro today asks for justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we answer “Patience.”

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.

Although slavery may have been abolished, the crippling poison of racism still persists, and the struggle still continues.

I'm not a docile, complacent person when it comes to racial aggressions.

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.

So now I'm going to forget the 400 years of lynching and killing raping and depriving my people feeding of justice and equality and the lowest of low last respect and I'm going to look at two or three white people who are trying to do right and don't see the other million who are trying to kill me? I'm not that big of a fool.

It's almost impossible to separate the actions, or it's also, it's almost impossible to separate the oppression and exploitation, criminal oppression and criminal exploitation of the American negro from the color of the skin of the person who is the oppressor or the exploiter.

The race problem in the United States is the type of unpleasant problem which we would rather do without but which refuses to be buried.

When I was a kid, no one would believe anything positive that you could say about black people. That's a terrible burden.

Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

There's a lot of racism still alive and still active.

I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.