Quincy Jones Quotes

The root of the black man's hate is rage, not the rage agaist the white man, but the rage for him to be out of his way, especially his children's way. The root of the white man's hate is terror.

Everything about us black people is complicated, us being here, being a minority, being a woman, all those things are complicated.

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.

Capitalism, racism and inhuman technocracy quietly develop in their own way. The causes of misery are no longer to be found in the inner attitudes of men, but have long been institutionalized.

I cannot be made into the commentator for the unspoken black masses.

History simmers beneath the surface in more communities than just Ferguson.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs... I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.

I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.

I have always felt that this story is universal. When I began to understand the details of the history, I felt that the most compelling aspect was not what happened, but what continues to happen and how it is denied.

When I think of the trials and tribulations that black men go through in America and that black artists went through, I feel very privileged.

Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.

I'm sick of making bloody history.

There's a black man inside of me just trying to make bail.

I could easily have decided that life was cruel, that being black meant everything was stacked against me.

You know, people'd always ask 'Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?' They never seen the house I'm running from.

In one sense, the stories I read betrayed me. Too few gave me back my mirror image. Fewer still spoke to, or acknowledged, the existence of the problems I faced as a black foster child from a dysfunctional and badly broken home.

The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.

Many African-American men are incarcerated. And so African-American women do carry an enormous burden. And traditionally have carried a greater burden than perhaps their white counterparts.

The negro has suffered far more from the commission of this crime against the women of his race by white men than the white race has ever suffered through his crimes.

I think riots happen when communities are under pressure for long periods of time. That's not a mistake.

You have no understanding of what it is to live in a community surcharged with an idle, dissolute, vicious, ignorant negro population just emerged from slavery.