Samuel L. Jackson Quotes

The white man's victory soon became complete by fraud, violence, intimidation and murder.

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

You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.

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.

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

The system of white supremacy is intended to make folks of color doubt themselves, their intelligence, their abilities, their very sanity. And so it's important to remember that folks of color know their own realities.

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.

It appears that there is a genocidal plan against Black people.

If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.

The white man says there is freedom and justice for all. We have had "freedom and justice," and that is why we have been almost exterminated. We shall not forget this.

If you are black the only roads into the mainland of American life are through subservience, cowardice, and loss of manhood.

Racialized oppression and dehumanization is woven into the very fabric of our nation — the effects of which can be seen in the lawful lynching of black and brown people by the police, and the mass incarceration of black and brown lives in the prison industrial complex,

In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage.

Racism is a very insidious thing. It's dangerous to the psyche, to mind and body. It erodes the self-confidence. And I don't know how we get through it.

I think we can continue to do as much protesting as we want. Systemic racism needs to be changed from within.

Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.

Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to racial prejudice and the personal actions that result. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.

Everything in American public life, when it comes to race relations, serves as a frame for a history of violence and degrading humiliation.

And I feel like, as a black man within black culture, I know very well firsthand - as do my parents and my grandparents and great-grandparents - we're used to things not going our way.

Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of 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.

The racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder really, unless the victim is white... blacks knew that white blood is the coin of freedom in a land where for four hundred years black blood has been shed unremarked and with impunity.

With black people, there are 50 Hitlers over the course of history.

Racism built me into a person that was set up to be self-destructive.

When I was a kid, no one would believe anything positive that you could say about black people. That's a terrible burden.