Paul Laurence Dunbar Quotes

Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.

Labels applied to people of any race are inherently offensive.

Perhaps the little Negro girl was holding a concealed razor blade. Maybe she was one of the troublemakers out for a fresh white scalp.

A general belief seems to prevail in the colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than the savages or natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir.

Santa Claus was white and everything bad was black. The little ugly duckling was the black duck, and the black cat was the bad luck. And if I threaten you, I'm going to blackmail you.I said, 'Momma, why don't they call it 'whitemail'? They lie too.'

Why hate someone for the color of their skin when there are much better reasons to hate them?

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.

Of all the ways people save time, I think racism is the worst.

Racial prejudice boils down to the deeply anti-American message that some people are born to fail.

I remember classes in college where the professor was espousing certain theories about how blacks were inherently less intelligent. But I learned a long time ago to give people the benefit of the doubt, not to assume that somebody was reacting to you because of race.

I never have a problem with being black. I have a problem with the easy association of what that means to some people.

Racism is not dead, but it is on life support -- kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as 'racists'

The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.

I'm glad Hurricane Katrina happened. It taught us an important lesson: black people can't swim.

As for the not-black black president issue - white people can imagine blacks worse off than them, no problem. And now they can imagine blacks better off, no problem. But they still can't imagine black people who are just like them. That's the real problem. That's racism. Not being able to believe that those others are actually just like you.

People expect black women to be angry, irrationally so, without reason. They think we are animals and we go around like the Wild Things.

These people didn't know anything about black people, so the only thing they could imagine was the worst thing.

I'm racist against non-black people.

Somebody told a lie one day. They couched it in language. They made everything Black ugly and evil. Look in your dictionaries and see the synonyms of the word Black. It's always something degrading and low and sinister. Look at the word White, it's always something pure, high and clean.

Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

He was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future games.

Now, personally, I am baffled by the concept of racial prejudice. Why hate someone based on the color of their skin when, if you take the time to get to know them as a human being, you can find so many other things to hate them for?

We're conditioned in this country to believe that if there's a problem, the black man is usually the culprit.