Benjamin Watson Quotes

The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so sensitive.

We do have a black president, and that means a lot. People ask, 'What has he done?' What he's done is change the color up, which you see on the screen. When the head of the free world is black, there's got to be some sort of spin-off from it.

My grandparents were colored. My parents were Negroes. And now I am Black.

I'm just one generation between someone who cheered when Germans were burning and someone who doesn't even know that there is a border. That's a miracle - really is a miracle - and it gets me really emotional.

I'm like, 'Wow, I guess a lot of people didn't have this type of upbringing'... that old world technique of, you know, nothing's given to you, you've gotta work for everything you've done... It's just different from what I'm seeing today.

Historically - when you look at how America has evolved, typically we make progress on race relations in fits and starts. We make some progress, and then there's maybe some slippage.

I think that the achievements of Catholicism on race are very, very impressive.

A lot of people want to change the world, but only a few people want to change themselves. When it comes to the issue of race in America, we have to do both.

After my election there was talk of a postracial America. And such a vision, however well intended, was never realistic.

You could feel America starting to ease up a little bit on racism, against blacks in certain pockets, and then suddenly The Cosby Show bubbled up and it was the right time for it.

What I'm interested in is modern American history. I'm taken with the changes that have occurred in America in my lifetime.

What's good for Blacks is good for all of America.

I am not opposed to the white race as charged by my enemies. I have no time to hate any one. All my time is devoted to the up-building and development of the Negro Race.

A generation earlier, I think that somebody from my background probably would not have felt fully comfortable at a college like Princeton. But, by the time I graduated from high school, things had changed.

The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has, the rest of us have always been living in a lie.

I think America is moving to a much more connected, inclusive and compassionate place.

The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.

Race relations can be an appropriate issue... but only if you want to craft solutions, and not catalogue complaints. If we use the issue appropriately, we can transform it from the cancer of our society into the cure.

It used to be said that you had to know what was happening in America because it gave us a glimpse of our future. Today, the rest of America, and after that Europe, had better heed what happens in California, for it already reveals the type of civilisation that is in store for all of us.

In America right now, the people who talk about race the most are people of color - and if we are going to move the needle forward, it's WHITE people who need to acknowledge their role in racism.

We could advance the human race enormously if we but learned to communicate honestly with our neighbors.

I think that the opportunity to improve race relations in the United States has been put off temporarily.

America is a remarkable place in that social attitudes change almost imperceptibly, and then you wake up the next day and they've changed. But they've been changing all the time.

The entire human race faced a singularity when one small group discovered, ooh, technology. We can live a different way. Eventually, that spelled the death of the old way of life.

I feel that the time is always right to do what is right. Where progress for the Negro in America is concerned, there is a tragic misconception of time among whites. They seem to cherish a strange, irrational notion that something in the very flow of time will cure all ills.