Colson Whitehead Quotes

Race in America is not a problem you can go over, or around or under. You've got to go through it.

I don't think that the country is ever ready to have the conversation about race.

Ours has not been a racially democratic society for 300 years.

We simply cannot insist that race should not matter when everything in life argues that it does.

I think race in America is a huge one. That's something that needs to be confronted, certainly.

We need to have a more thoughtful, two-sided conversation about racial issues in this country.

I do not claim to be an expert on race in America.

We are a society that has been structured from top to bottom by race. You don't get beyond that by deciding not to talk about it anymore. It will always come back; it will always reassert itself over and over again.

If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

Racism cannot be cured solely by attacking some of the results it produces, like discrimination in housing or in education.

To believe that the United States is post-racial requires an almost incomprehensible inability or unwillingness to stare truth in the face.

It's hard to say when or if we will actually arrive at that place called 'post-racial', or, better yet, post-racism.

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.

A lot of problems that are going on aren't going to get better if we don't talk about it. Race is the biggest one. It's a very, very uncomfortable topic because the biggest part of America was founded on it.

The first thing that Black Lives Matter had to do was remind people that racism existed in this country because when we had Obama, people thought we were post-racial. That was the debate. Is racism over? And very quickly, we understood that it was not over.

So many white people don't want to talk about race; it's uncomfortable. Many reason that slavery happened more than a century ago, and people alive today had nothing to do with it. But the particulars of these stories, from slavery to segregation to civil rights and mass incarceration, are at the marrow of life in America today.

I think, if you're in the United States, we've seen people trying to speak out in different ways and trying to make themselves heard about the United States' failure to move on generationally, given the long-festering wound of our history around race.

I think we are aware that post-racialism isn't real, right? I mean, I hope so. I kind of joke that we're post-post-racial.

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

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born.

The only reason race matters is because of racism.

Telling me that I’m obsessed with talking about racism in America is like telling me I’m obsessed with swimming when I’m drowning.

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.