Hilton Als Quotes

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.

I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers.

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.

To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good. To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.

We knew then what we know now; only exemplary blacks are acceptable.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

People know about the Klan and the overt racism, but the killing of one's soul little by little, day after day, is a lot worse than someone coming in your house and lynching you.

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this.

By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching.

White supremacy and the sickness that it produces disallows us [Blacks] to perceive reality properly.

Black people were so angry at me. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good black people. The world just isn't like that.

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.

Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction, and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness.

Unfortunately, as I tell my white friends, we, as black people, we're never going to be successful - not because of you white people but because of other black people. When you're black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people.

In the past, I said I didn't want to speak on certain issues because the second I said one thing about race, then 'Tyron's playing the race card.' But if you really think about it, what is the race card? The race card is that the man held me down, I had unfair circumstances, and I wasn't able to be successful because I was held down.

When the residue of oppression and fear are compounded over time, when the historical precedents of policing and discrimination manifest themselves over and over again, the very act of waking up to a world complicit in your distress can feel like a herculean task. But black people are human beings, just like everyone else.

I was a player who was vying to do exactly what everyone else was doing, and I happened to be black.

Being a black person in America is exhausting.

If you are born black, and you don't accept your natural status as a victim, then the validity of your blackness is immediately called into question.

Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.

I was raised a black child in the South, where you're indoctrinated into a religion that an oppressor gave you.

Racial oppression of black people in America has done what neither class oppression or sexual oppression, with all their perniciousness, has ever done: destroyed an entire people and their culture.

I think that one of the hardest things in the world to be is a black male. I mean everyone hates your guts. White men are afraid of you. White women are afraid of you. The cops hate you. The government wants you dead. Your own people want to shoot you for what you got. You just can't get over it. And even if you are able to get over it you're forced to do it on the white guy's terms.

As a person of color, you're in a PhD level racism class, every day. Every day, I'm in a deep racism seminar. And I'm not saying that white people aren't taking that class, but they don't show up that often and they're auditing it.

I look at racism as one of the social demons. And, in its worst, it's violent and it's a systemic commitment to oppression.