Colman Domingo Quotes

Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.

The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is not, you know, necessarily about, you know, whether you're a good person or not or whether you see black people, you know, on the street, and you're willing to shake their hands and be polite.

If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.

Throughout every presidency since the heist of our country from indigenous peoples, the black American experience has been exceptional in its discomfort. And no chief executive of this great nation has, in earnest, developed a unique plan to remedy that discomfort.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

What I want to know is how the white man, with the blood of black people dripping off his fingers, can have the audacity to be asking black people, 'Do they hate him?' That takes a lot of nerve.

This is a racist country.

I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.

Codifying discrimination in our laws should be something we read about in American history, not on the front pages of today's American newspapers and magazines.

History looks very different from a black point of view. The heroes are different, and the eras get different names. The Progressive Era is no longer the Progressive Era, because it's the era in which more black people are lynched than in any other period in American history.

I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

Far from ending, systemic racism reinvents itself to conform to what is publically acceptable, leaving the quality of black life diminished and more permanently fixed with each passing decade.

America isn't made for the black man.

In America, a black man has to feel like he's God just to make it a little bit when white people can just feel human. They can just be themselves, but for me, I feel we have to start instilling that back into our people. That pride. That black power. That privilege to be alive.

I have to be honest: I feel like I live in a constant state of rage, and I think a lot of black people do.

Black people are experiencing a systemic disadvantage, and it goes back to slavery, which was not that long ago.

I came in the gate as an African-American poor kid wanting to be a neurosurgeon but - with American life and the places I was put due to American history and laws and the oppression of black people - I had to make it work in other ways.

I don't love America; I love people and places in America. How could I truly love an entity that views me as subhuman, that wrote in its constitution for me to be considered three-fifths of a person?

At least black people knew when they were slaves; you remain clueless.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

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

Nobody black had learned anything from the 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail' or from the 'I Have a Dream' speech. That was a revelation of white people.

White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations.

White Americans have a short memory.

The election, and even the re-election, of a black man as president, in a country that is 87 percent non-black - a first in human history - has had no impact on what are called 'racial tensions.'