Margo Jefferson Quotes

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.

For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

Blacks essentially play the race card, when necessary as a counter to white privilege.

Whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior.

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

We're not so much anti-black as we are pro-white.

The Southern Negro is not an incurably ignorant ape. The Southern white masses are not biologically degenerate.

Some people resented the fact I was trying to break a white man's record.

I never ceased to be surprised when southern whites, at their homes or clubs, told racial jokes and spoke so derogatorily of blacks while longtime servants, for whom they quite clearly had some affection, were well within earshot.

White consciousness is deeply anti-black, and that's for progressives and conservatives.

It's much easier to talk about racism when you're able to use mutants as a metaphor. People would much rather talk about Charles Xavier and Magneto than they would about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.

I wasn't aware of Ku Klux Klan as I was aware of the widespread assumption that African-Americans were dumber than white people. I think my father believed that. I think everybody white did.

I don't think many people understand what racism is. The intellectuals use it like toilet paper; it's something they can use. It's not something they live.

I am angry about the world's conditions for black people.

Have the colored people done anything to justify the prejudice against them that does exist in the hearts of so many white persons and, generally, of one great political party in this country? Have they done anything to justify it? No, sir.

We've begun to put fear into those whites who think they can do anything they want to a black person and get away with it.

The minute you understand racism, you're responsible for being racist. It's like eating from the tree of knowledge.

As an African-American, I know all too well the negative thoughts and feelings hatred and bigotry cause.

For generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise black people.

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 are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... he has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.

I would not use the influence of my office to deter citizens from punishing that nigger brute. I would have gladly resigned as governor and gone to Honea Path and led the mob myself.

Thought the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resisted at every step of his progress.