Sherman Alexie Quotes

From the beginning, it has been a no-no for a black man to touch a white woman.

I had no expectations of white people at all.

Reardan is the rich white farm town that sits in the wheat fields exactly 22 miles away from the Rez. And it's a hick town I suppose filled with farmers and rednecks and racists cops who stop every Indian that drives through. During one week when I was little dad got stopped three times for DWI- Driving While Indian.

Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

And then there was moments with white guy where like we would be in Harlem. There would be five brothers in the corner, and this is an awful feeling but you're holding his hand and you want to pull your hand away cause you don't want the judgment. And you're gonna get the judgment even if it's just in looks. And the black men are the worst when it comes to judging.

As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life.

I was in California when this journalist made a blanket statement about the fact that she did not think that black men and women had the kind of love relationship that Rebecca and Nathan had in Sounder.

I was conscious of the fact that it could be to my disadvantage to marry a white guy - that some folks would hold that against me.

Everyone is so terrified of being labeled a racist.

I found there's a fairly blatant racism in America that's already there, and I don't think I noticed it when I lived here as a kid. But when I went back to South Africa, and then it's sort of thrust in your face, and then came back here - I just see it everywhere.

Growing up in Michigan, I can't think of anything so explicitly communicated to me in my whole education experience as the vileness of in-your-face racism.

There's no such thing as reverse racism.

I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s.

It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.

I remember people saying: 'You look funny, your hair is so black, you have a flat nose,' but I didn't think of it being racism, and I still don't. But there was a sense of difference, of being an outsider.

We think that there really is racial bias in determining who people want to date.

There are too many Jews in chess. They seem to have taken away the class of the game. They don't seem to dress so nicely. That's what I don't like.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye.

Only those who hate the Negro see hatred in the Negro.

It's something that black men still go through to this day, which is women clutching their purses, hitting the lock button on store, or just basic attitudes. And even as a U.S. congressman, as a black man, it is very, very frustrating, and you build up an internal anger about it that you can't act on.

Let's face it: there's still a certain amount of racism in human beings, so that shows up in Hollywood.

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

I would get so angry whenever I'd notice people looking at me weirdly. They'd even stop me on the street and ask questions about my skin color.

There's a big difference between being racist and racially insensitive.

Perhaps the little Negro girl was holding a concealed razor blade. Maybe she was one of the troublemakers out for a fresh white scalp.