Jesmyn Ward Quotes

The reality is we have allowed systemic racism to continue through all these years.

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

Racism is systemic: It's oppression that's built into the laws, legislation, into the way neighborhoods are policed, and into job opportunities and health care and education.

If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.

I know I'm breaking a taboo by using the term antiwhite racism, but I do so intentionally, because it's the reality some of our fellow citizens live with, and remaining quiet about it only aggravates their trauma.

Some issues just need to be dealt with - that we're still dealing with in the world, with police brutality and racism.

All racism is wrong, and denying that it exists does not make it go away.

We need to recognize that racism has never been subtle, though it has gone underreported.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

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.

Baby, black promoters oppressed me before white promoters ever got hold of me. Don't talk skin to me.

This is a racist country.

I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away.

Negroes are not qualified to be integrated within his command. When I find them qualified, they will be integrated.

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

He shatters the myth of white supremacy once and for all.

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.

I suggest that what has happened to the white Southerner is in some ways much worse than what has happened to the Negroes there ... One has to assume that he is a man like me, but he does not know what drives him to use the club, to menace with a gun, and to use a cattle prod against a woman's breasts ... Their moral lives have been destroyed by a plague called color.

He missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow

You spend your whole lifetime in your occupation, actually making life clever, easy and convenient for white people. But when you have to get transportation home, you are denied an equal accommodation. Our existence was for the white man's comfort and well-being; we had to accept being deprived of just being human.

There's still a really divisive residue in our nation that's called racism and prejudice and oppression and sexism.

Of course there's racism in this country, and we have a terrible history of that in this nation.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.