Constance Baker Motley Quotes

Could it be that my circle is largely black and that it is why I am influential in black circles but not in white circles?

In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.

Like his white brother in the U. S. A., the American Negro is a proletarian by compulsion and not by choice. He regards the bourgeoisie with adulation rather than antagonism and, like most other Americans, cannot see "culture" except in white tie and tails. His consuming ambition is to become a bourgeois himself, and in this he is a carbon copy of his white fellow American.

The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black. And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

I'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers - even those who came from it.

I think there's a tendency in England, when you look at the past, to either have upper middle class period drama with its own rules, or if you're going to look at working class people, you have to do that in a particular 'Isn't it a shame, aren't they oppressed' way, or it's treated comically.

In Britain, when the working class are summoned for fiction, it's 'isn't it a shame, isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, the terribly poor things... ' whereas from within, it's nothing like that. It's fantastic, it's glamorous, it's terrible and good the same as it is for everybody.

It's unfortunate that myself, as a black man, cannot care about the issues that impact the black community without being seeing as a race-baiter or without being seen as someone who doesn't care about any other ethnic groups.

I definitely feel like, in America, even though race is a social construct... there's still a line drawn in the sand; there still are sides. Politically, there's a black side and a white side, and I stand unapologetically on the black side.

I'm not posh, not in the slightest. My parents spent some money on my education, but I wasn't born to the purple.

Any successful black person will have to face suspicion within his or her own community about his or her loyalty to other blacks.

The white man, in his press, is going to identify me with 'hate.'

The black community now in many ways divided itself the way the larger white community divides itself, over class issues. And that race is no longer the bond that it once was. That's one of the prices you pay for progress.

What worries me is that 'post-racial' America is not that different from the Americas that have preceded us, and it might not ever be.

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.

The middle-class America of my youth was another country.

I'm tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live.

Because of unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, [freed slaves] never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country.

The cultural barriers and social and economic differences separating the Africans and African-Americans is sometimes the cause of a simmering hostility and misunderstanding between them. Sharing the common physical characteristic of skin color has not ensured cultural and economic unity between African immigrants and American-born blacks.

‘The laboring poor’ is a detestable, canting phrase.

To talk about race in America is to explore the wilderness inside ourselves and to come to terms with a history that we’d rather conceal.

The ignorance of the working class and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are superstitions fostered by ... universities and churches, and by all the centers of privilege.

I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

If you seat these black buggers, the whole South will walk out.

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.