Henry Giroux Quotes

As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.

White supremacy is so deep-seated that it's hard to see it eliminated. But we could definitely push it back.

We are still conditioning people in this country and, indeed, all over the globe to the myth of white superiority. We are constantly being told that we don't have racism in this country anymore, but most of the people who are saying that are white. White people think it isn't happening because it isn't happening to them.

All of this in [Donald] Trump now has become so overt that it's difficult when we talk about repression not to talk about white supremacy, not to talk about its legacy, from slavery to lynching to mass incarceration, and what it has developed into.

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.

I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.

If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.

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.

I say we haven't ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

When you're white, the sky's the limit. When you're black, the limit's the sky.

The system of white supremacy is intended to make folks of color doubt themselves, their intelligence, their abilities, their very sanity. And so it's important to remember that folks of color know their own realities.

If one lives in a country where racism is held valid and practiced in all ways of life eventually, no matter whether one is a racist or a victim, one comes to feel the absurdity of life....Racism generated from whites is first of all absurd. Racism creates absurdity among blacks as a defense mechanism.

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.

We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all America stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

I mean, we're not talking about simply racism, we're taking about white supremacy.

We live in a racist world. Everywhere there is racism. We say to White people, "You really have to examine how you behave in the world. You are responsible for deconstructing internalized racism and being part of a ongoing process of decolonizing yourself.

When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.

The haughty American nation ... makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a bootblack.

The logic behind white domination is to prepare the black man for the subservient role in this country.

The issue of racism and racial prejudice. It is very, very difficult to discuss. It is difficult to discuss the issue of apartheid. Many have made the observation that it is very difficult to find anyone in SA who ever supported apartheid because everyone was opposed, it was against our will and so on.

Of all the ways people save time, I think racism is the worst.

Nowhere in history has the white man been brotherly toward anyone.

Racial prejudice boils down to the deeply anti-American message that some people are born to fail.