Maxine Waters Quotes

White communities - and I exempt poor white communities from this - have power over their representation. White people have the ability to define themselves, to exert their agency in a way that they get to be believed. No one believes black people. No one. Until a white person vouches for them.

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

In the U.S., while individual whites might be against racism, they still benefit from their group's control. Yes, an individual person of color can sit at the tables of power, but the overwhelming majority of decision-makers will be white. Yes, white people can have problems and face barriers, but systematic racism won't be one of them.

Like it or not, most things in this country are run by white males.

As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.

While individual whites may be against racism, they still benefit from the distribution of resources controlled by their group.

In the NBA, as in nowhere else in America, white people are utterly beholden to black people, and they're not about to let us off that easily. It's a kind of very mild payback for the last 500 years.

Whiteness is dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels. These processes and practices include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.

I was born on an island with 96 percent of the people black. But all the power and the economy was in the hands of white people who only formed four per cent.

No, we are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.

I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.

People of color grow up steeped in 'white' culture. The reverse is not true. And, no, listening to hip-hop on the way to work does not count as immersion.

'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.

Our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege has perpetuated racial inequality and race-based political resentments.

Republicans have bypassed black leaders in favor of their handpicked “independent thinkers,” who are distrusted by Black voters.

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.

Modern technical civilization does not seem to be as well handled by the black man as by the white man in the United States

Historically, people of color and the Diaspora have been at the bottom of the barrel, even as it relates to immigration. If we don't engage in the discussion, then what is it that we're saying to people? That we don't care?

The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, though scarcely anyone seems to notice. All eyes are fixed on people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey who have defied the odds and achieved great power, wealth, and fame.

In Puerto Rico, we continue to see the perpetuation of second-class citizenship in the United States.

The extraordinary nature of individual black achievement in formerly white domain certainly does suggest that the old Jim Crow is dead, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of racial caste - if history is any guide, it may have just taken a different form.

The great white advantage has been living inside history, adapting to its constant demands, nurturing the values and the habits of life that allow one to keep pace. This is the cultural capital that whites too often take for granted and rarely think of insisting on in the former victims of exclusion.