Charles B. Rangel Quotes

I'm someone very interested in diversity, equity, social justice, and getting rid of white supremacy.

Race prejudice can't be talked down, it must be lived down.

The only way you get to the goal of color blindness is to be color conscious along the way.

The whole issue of race and discrimination is a moral issue.

Even in 'Hollyoaks,' we were known as 'the black family' as opposed to just 'the new family.' But that's where we are in the world, I guess. It's getting better; everything's heading in the right direction, whether it be race, sex, gender.

I can't say that there's been some big change during my career where all of a sudden everything's totally colorblind.

We've come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

Education is the key solution for change, for peace, and for help in the fight against racism and discrimination in general.

There are positive steps being taken to tackle issues that people from all walks of life, races, ethnicities, and political persuasions agree have been devastating to communities of color.

There's a bad thing that we have in America, and that is a slow, sticky way that we get out of prejudice. We get out of it very, very slowly. It's like walking through tar. But we're getting out; things are changing.

Certainly we can end racism with love. We can demand that the federal government change its emphasis on racial distinction.

I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.

There's a lot of Americans, black and white, who think that we've arrived where we need to be and nothing else needs to be done and affirmative action needs to be dismantled.

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.

American society will never completely understand the true meaning of equality.

I'll also say, yes, I think the change in black consciuosness in recent years has made me more sensitive to injustice in every area of my life.

I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.

Where the effects of past discrimination persist, society has an obligation to take positive steps to overcome the legacy of injustice. Judiciously administered affirmative action programs in education and employment can be important expressions of the drive for solidarity and participation that is at the heart of true justice. Social harm calls for social relief.

Until racial justice and freedom is a reality in this land, our union will remain profoundly imperfect.... The Negro is going to get justice or this society will be ripped apart.

We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust.

We are justified in believing that the success of this movement for equality of the sexes means more progress toward equality of the races.

The cost of remaining segregated when others integrated was too high …. Society’s best safeguard against persistent discrimination is competition.

In approaching this problem [school desegregation], we cannot turn the clock back...

The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos or whatever in each school… What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?

That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.