Bert Williams Quotes

We live in a world where racism hasn't changed at all. It's that old thing of, you know, the more things change, the more things remain the same.

Color does matter, even though people don't see it. I've lived it my whole life. It's just what I know.

I know what it's like to be denied opportunity based on the nature of your skin.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.

Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it's like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can't really speak on it, because I wasn't there. I don't feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.

The only crime I'm guilty of is being a young black woman.

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.

Racism is essentially natural, it's old fashioned it's an evolutionary phase that we're going through. Ultimately it wont exist.

I find that the prejudice in this country to color is very great, and I sometimes fear that it is on the increase.

All the grand work was laid for people who came after me. The Supreme Court decided not to give it to me, so they gave it to two white guys. I think that's what they were waiting for.

I am viewed as the Negro who has gone outside of the categories assigned to me.

This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.

We must treat the disease of racism. This means we must understand the disease.

He was murdered by every member of the gospel who has remained silent about racial discrimination—who has hidden behind the stained glass windows of his church.. He was murdered by every Negro who accepted segregation.

Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored—it is a shadow over all of us.

The black herring of intermarriage has been dragged too often across the trail to justice. 'Would you want your sister to marry a nigger?' is still the question that is supposed to stun any white man who sponsors rights for Negroes. It stirs Negroes to ironic laughter, although on all levels they recognize the white man's fear of intermarriage as deep seated…

We are still a nation deeply divided by race and class.

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.

What whites cannot experience and may never understand is that no matter which side of the bed I chose to wake up on, I would still be a black man in the racially divisive America.

As a woman, as a Jew, as a lesbian, as a labor leader in a time of great anti-union animus, I know that other people project their biases on me. But it is nothing like the experience of our African-American brothers and sisters, especially black and brown men and boys.

As far back as I can remember, I knew there was something wrong with our way of life when people could be mistreated because of the color of their skin.

I think the traditional stereotypes are loaded in institutional racism.

It's just a fact. You've got to deal with racism wherever you go.

Racism can be called our nation's own specific 'original sin.'