James McBride Quotes

We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.

Liberal whites are the greatest enemy of African Americans.

There's not a white man in this country who can say he never benefited from being white.

Many thought that the abolition of slavery, the end of Jim Crow, and the legislative progress of the Civil Rights Era, among other watershed moments, would have fundamentally done away with the racist structures that have long oppressed black people. However, we know that has been far from the case.

As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.

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.

Being white is a job in America. You take that away, you better get the soldiers out.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.

The reason why you were allowed to get away with that in the '60s and '70s is because this country's racist administrative policies were such that rich white kids were getting exemptions. I said no exemptions.

There are plenty of African-Americans in this country - and I would say this goes right up to the White House - who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy.

Sadly, whites are rarely open to what black and brown folks have to say regarding their ongoing experiences with racist mistreatment. And we are especially reluctant to discuss what that mistreatment means for us as whites: namely that we end up with more and better opportunities as the flipside of discrimination.

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?

Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world. Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil.

We need to have a conversation about the fact that black faces are not as visible as they should be, that there is huge inequality everywhere in terms of race.

The thing people have to remember is there's nothing natural about racism as it exists in America. I mean, we know this historically. We can look at 1619, when Africans first came here, and how early African slaves intermixed pretty indiscriminately with indentured white servants.

When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused.

America isn't made for the black man.

We need to dismantle the systems that were built on racism, that were built on the backs of black people.

You can never have enough reinforcements, resources for black women to thrive in the world. The topic has been addressed a million times before, but it will never end because what we're up against keeps morphing, and we have to figure out how to beat it.

So many white people don't want to talk about race; it's uncomfortable. Many reason that slavery happened more than a century ago, and people alive today had nothing to do with it. But the particulars of these stories, from slavery to segregation to civil rights and mass incarceration, are at the marrow of life in America today.

White people need to wake up and tell the truth about US history and the inequality and the ways in which racism is so entrenched.

If you read some of the recent literature, there is no such thing as whiteness. But we made it up. Not my original thought, but it's true. Because you were born white, you have advantages systemically, culturally, psychology there. They have been built up for hundreds of years. Many people can't look at it.

Whiteness is dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels. These processes and practices include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.

Everyone who has a pair of eyes in this country understands the racial tensions and the issues we have are very serious and they're not going away. Just because we had Barack Obama as our president and, on paper, everything looks equal, it's very clearly not.