Hank Aaron Quotes

If you're African American, you are forced into making different choices, in a lot of cases, than you are as a white person.

... if the United States is indeed the great melting pot, the Negro either didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.

The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable.

We're not willing to give black leaders second chances because, in most cases, we're not willing to give them first chances.

The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society.

Unless young blacks are brought into the mainstream of economic life, they will continue to be on the curbstone.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

We don't want something for youth at risk, we want something for black youth at risk.

I thought the Navy at times resembled a Southern plantation that had somehow escaped the Civil War. Blacks swabbed the decks, shined shoes, did the cooking, washed the dishes, and served the food. Virtually no other jobs were open to them.

If this country is a melting pot, then either the Afro-American didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.

I have spent years representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality and investigating patterns of drug law enforcement in poor communities of color - and attempting to help people who have been released from prison attempting to 're-enter' into a society that never seemed to have much use to them in the first place.

Far from ending, systemic racism reinvents itself to conform to what is publically acceptable, leaving the quality of black life diminished and more permanently fixed with each passing decade.

America isn't made for the black man.

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.

When you're white, the sky's the limit. When you're black, the limit's the sky.

See, the Black man gotta fly to get to something the white man can walk to.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

As a black actor, you always have the feeling that there's not as much work out there as for a white counterpart, but is America after all; you have to play ball if you're going to play ball.

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.

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 only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

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.