Trevante Rhodes Quotes

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

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this.

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.

If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.

Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy.

Slavery didn't end in 1865; it just evolved.

Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he has done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States and the world. He walks us on a tightrope from birth.

Far from ending, systemic racism reinvents itself to conform to what is publically acceptable, leaving the quality of black life diminished and more permanently fixed with each passing decade.

Black Lives Matter is not just concerned with what happens in policing. The disregard, the disrespect, and the lack of dignity for black life transcends through the fabric of our society.

Black people are experiencing a systemic disadvantage, and it goes back to slavery, which was not that long ago.

In the U.S., while individual whites might be against racism, they still benefit from their group's control. Yes, an individual person of color can sit at the tables of power, but the overwhelming majority of decision-makers will be white. Yes, white people can have problems and face barriers, but systematic racism won't be one of them.

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.

I'm not trying to say that it never hurt or that I never felt its sting, but I can honestly say that I never blamed anybody for racism. I have considered it more of a manifestation of humanity's problem rather than my personal problem.

When I think of the trials and tribulations that black men go through in America and that black artists went through, I feel very privileged.

It is true that as people, we tend to remember only the positive. With time, the grim details fade away, and as a species we survive on this notion. In our desire to gloss over the undeniable macabre parts of our American history, we forget. That amnesia manifests itself, especially when dealing with the plight of black men.

If black people mistrust white people, they are mistrusting racism, and that is appropriate.

You don't need someone destroying you when your own people are the worst messengers possible. And this is what black people in America have not come to grips with.

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

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

It's very hard to be black in this country and hate America. It's really hard to live like that. I would actually argue it's impossible to fully see yourself.

All God’s dangers ain’t White men.