Richard Rodriguez Quotes

Just as important I believe, is Black America can look back at the show and say, "Wow, I think I now understand why a lot of white people were appalled at the acquittal of O.J. Simpson."

My mother worked in the white world, but I lived almost exclusively in a black world. I don't think I had ever seen a white teacher until I got to high school.

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.

Race remains a significant challenge in America.

To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica's black mass.

I think America has always been polarized... It's a racist country and it has always been.

There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to people of white skin.... The more I feel like an American, the more the situation pains me.

A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once, the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared.

We're talking about race. It's ideology, it's a mode of policy. It's a practice. And it intertwines with class in a very specific way to create something very distinctive that we see now being legitimated in the United States by fascists who absolutely are unapologetic about what they're saying.

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.

When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.

The prejudice of the race appears stronger in the States that have abolished slaves than in the States where slavery still exists. White carpenters, white bricklayers, and white painters will not work side by side with the blacks in the North but do it in almost every Southern State.

After years in white theaters I dreaded working in colored houses. The noise, the stomping, whistling, and cheering that hadn't annoyed me when I was young was now something I dreaded.

I think it's totally possible and plausible that racial balkanization is a recurring aspect of the nature of human politics.

College was where I got to actually experience the difference between black and white.

I grew up in a largely black community during the '70s and '80s that scoffed at 'white' music. That music - folk, rock, some disco - was considered soulless, aberrant, just one more example of the Caucasian's desire to scream and yell and demand whatever their privilege and perpetual adolescence dictated they should demand.

You Negroes are not willing to admit it yet, but integration will not work. Why, it is against the white man's nature to integrate you into his house.

The thing is that it's always a constant reminder of how violent this country has been, always has been, you know. I'm still frustrated with these conversations: [Barack] Obama is black so that means this, that things are better, or it means that you voted for him because he's black.

In America, black is a country.

White people have always shown their superiority over blacks with their feet, moving out of black neighborhoods with the fear that their kids will turn into one of them. And now, through the magic of MTV, damned if it didn't turn out that way!

Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept.

I remember when I was a kid being called names, including the 'n' word. The first time that happened, it really bothered me. But most of the people I dealt with were all white. Most of my close friends were white.

Black culture is cool, but black issues sure aren't, huh?

I cannot face my God much longer knowing that his black creatures are held separate and distinct from his white creatures in the game that has given me all that I can call my own.

I don’t believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A. you are referring to categories again.