Paul Beatty Quotes

If white America is ready to extend complete democratic rights to colored people, there will be no race, no racial tension and no racial prejudice on either side, but we can be sure that any movement 'back to normalcy' in race relations will be bitterly resisted by colored people. It is now up to white America to make its choice...

The only reason race matters is because of racism.

Racial problems can't be easily reconciled with a pat account about racism and discrimination that lets us sort of relax into saying when we finally get this right, when we get rid of racism, when we reach the post-racial society, everything is going to be okay. Well, no, because along the way here, as we've not yet been in this racial nirvana, facts on the ground have been created.

I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.

Race has no place in American life or law.

Until the white man in America sits down and talks with The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, he won't even know what the race problem - what makes the race problem what it is.

I know that so many of us hoped that, by electing our first black president, we had turned the page on this chapter in our history. But, despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America's long struggle with race is far from finished.

It's not easy to be a martyr in the field of race relations.

The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.

Despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America's long struggle with race is far from finished.

I don't sign for white people.

The conversation about race is inevitable. It's one that people know that we have to have and continue to have.

Few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks.

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.

Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution's focus upon the individual. ...To pursue the concept of racial entitlement - even for the most admirable and benign of purposes - is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American

The relation between the white and colored people of this country is the great, paramount, imperative, and all-commanding question for this age and nation to solve

What I remember about race relations in the 1990s is that you showed your awareness by saying you didn't see race, that you were colour-blind.

I'll stop talking about race when people stop being racist.

The white race is doomed not because it's white but because of its misdeeds.

If you truly believe in the brotherhood of man, then you must believe that blacks are just as capable of being racists as whites are.

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'

I am not antiwhite, because I understand that white people, like black ones, are victims of a racist society. They are products of their time and place.

We live in a really racist culture and it's got to be addressed.

Race baiters and discriminators may go underground, but they never move out of town.

I think "post-racial" is a dangerous trap. You can fall into complacency and give your complicity a much more dangerous character.