Steve Earle Quotes

A smart black guy is confronting for most people. But that's on them, not on me.

Racial bias does exist, and until we can all admit its existence and become introspective as to whether our own personal biases are impacting how we deal with others, there will be no change.

You are not born racist. You are born into a racist society. And like anything else, if you can learn it, you can unlearn it. But some people choose not to unlearn it, because they're afraid they'll lose power if they share with other people. We are afraid of sharing power. That's what it's all about.

Racism is like high blood pressure—the person who has it doesn’t know he has it until he drops over with a God damned stroke. There are no symptoms of racism. The victim of racism is in a much better position to tell you whether or not you’re a racist than you are.

But I've never met a racist yet who thinks he's a racist. That's always the disturbing thing about when we begin to look at ourselves.

When people rely on surface appearances and false racial stereotypes, rather than in-depth knowledge of others at the level of the heart, mind and spirit, their ability to assess and understand people accurately is compromised.

I can be standing in Barneys with my coat and purse and my selections, and some white woman will say, 'Can you get this in my size?' What she sees is a black woman, and her service button goes off.

We know that we're not supposed to be racially biased, and we don't want to think of ourselves as racially biased, so we tell ourselves a different story.

I think prejudice has gotten to a point where a lot of people hold biases in their mind and don't even realize that they're doing it, because it's deeply ingrained in the fabric of what it means to be an American.

There are a lot of people who like to think they don't have prejudices and that they're open people, and yet, we all have that in ourselves, oftentimes against people of our own race or our own gender or whatever.

People who are aware of, and ashamed of, their prejudices are well on the road to eliminating them.

I honestly thought that since I didn't associate myself with any people or groups who were outwardly racist, and I didn't act in a way that struck me as racist, that this meant that I myself was not a racist, and that racism wasn't a huge issue.

As a black man, sometimes you can't tell if what you're seeing has underlying bigotry, or it's a normal conversation and you're being paranoid. That dynamic in itself is unsettling. I admit sometimes I see race and racism when its not there.

I'm not the authority on the subject. I'm a middle-aged white guy speaking about racism. I'm just finding it a really difficult subject to broach.

This is really honest: I have to remind myself not to look another black man as a threat.

A white man of authority don't ever want to admit to someone of colour they was wrong.

The most anyone could reasonably say about institutional racism is that the 'evidence is far from conclusive.

The question that white people need to ask ourselves is not if we were shaped by the forces of racism, but how.

I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in America jump to conclusions about each other.

I just think racism is within each and every one of us. It's everyone's responsibility to figure out how they deal with this kind of obsolete instinct.

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.

Kids know nothing about racism. They're taught that by adults.

For instance, if you're a black guy and you got pulled over, and you didn't know that any other black men were being pulled over, you would constantly in the back of your head be thinking, "What did I do?" rather than, "I didn't do anything, these are just the conditions I live under."

There is a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he is African American. There’s no question about that and it’s the kind of thing nobody ever says but everybody’s thinking it.

We learn to be racist, therefore we can learn not to be racist. Racism is not genetical. It has everything to do with power.