Dick Gregory Quotes

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

What whites cannot experience and may never understand is that no matter which side of the bed I chose to wake up on, I would still be a black man in the racially divisive America.

We tend to think of racism as this interpersonal verbal or physical abuse, when in truth, that is only one way that racism manifests itself. The reality of contemporary racism is that it while it is ubiquitous, it is often invisible, subsequently making it more difficult to name and identify.

I'm not trying to say that it never hurt or that I never felt its sting, but I can honestly say that I never blamed anybody for racism. I have considered it more of a manifestation of humanity's problem rather than my personal problem.

The man does not beat your head because you got a Cadillac or because you got a Ford; he beats you because you're black!

Let me just say that to imagine racism does not exist is imagination. And to imagine that it does not create its own set of problems is true imagination. So let's not imagine that racism is gone, extinguished, because it's not. We are seeing this in the top levels of the political arena, and we are seeing it very, very plainly.

White supremacy is not just a social arrangement: it is a race-based faith.

The minute you understand racism, you're responsible for being racist. It's like eating from the tree of knowledge.

This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.

The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.

Every institution where a number of the coloured races are, or can be drawn together, shall be broken up… If we destroy, or prevent the building of the nest, we shall not be liable to the incursions of the brood.

If you are black the only roads into the mainland of American life are through subservience, cowardice, and loss of manhood.

Any white person who shall assemble with slaves, or free negroes ... for the purpose of instructing them to read or write, ...shall be punished by confinement in the jail ... and by fine. .

One hundred years ago the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin…. The negro today asks for justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we answer “Patience.”

If I may seem a bit moved about this, it is because of the hell I have been through because I am a Negro, and I think this committee ought to show a little more consideration for the democracy that Negroes are denied .... the menace that ought to be paid attention to is the menace where 14 or 15 million Negroes have no place to turn to feel that they are protected.

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.

When we finally got school buses for African American students in Georgia, the state legislature ordained that the front bumpers be painted black. Not even the school busses could be equal.

… nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

Institutionalized racism is an imaginary enemy.

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

I'm hoping that somehow with songs like 'American Gold' there will be some kind of justice, and people just stop being so close-minded to where they're like, 'Oh, it's not race.' It's easy to say that when you're not black and you haven't experienced it.

You know what, man, that's part and parcel of being a black person in this country: everything's harder. It just is.

If you asked me why I went to jail, the easiest explanation would be to say, 'Because I'm black.'

Racism has two primary functions: the oppression of people of color, which most people recognize, but also the simultaneous elevation of white people. You can't hold one group down without lifting the other up.