Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

I know that I am a black man in a white world. . . I know that I never had it made.

Why must we always talk about race anyway? Can't we just be human beings? And Professor Hunk replied - that is exactly what white privilege is, that you can say that. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.

Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

So the mayor of New Orleans would have used his own buses had the people had been white?

It's more dangerous to be black in America...If you are a normal white American, the truth is you don't understand being black in America, and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk in a way that you have to be corrected.

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.

The white man will keep on granting tokenism; a few big Negroes will get big jobs, but the black masses will catch hell as long as they stay in the white man's house.

The media really only pays attention to white people. I think America is really racist.

I don't believe for a minute anybody allowed people to suffer because they are African Americans.

Well, the white race in America is the same way. As individuals it is impossible for them to escape the collective crime committed against the Negroes in this country, collectively.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

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.

It saddens me that African Americans - when they express their pain, when they protest about police violence, when they question inequality, when they raise issues of bondage and discrimination - African Americans are seen as not patriotic.

We need to have a conversation about the fact that black faces are not as visible as they should be, that there is huge inequality everywhere in terms of race.

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.

Generations of black women have anxiously watched as our children walk out into a world set against them. We teach them how to respond to police and how to react to racist comments, knowing that these lessons are not guaranteed to protect our children.

The default of our society is the reproduction of racial inequality. I mean, that's what it does; that's what it's been doing for hundreds of years.

In America, a black man has to feel like he's God just to make it a little bit when white people can just feel human. They can just be themselves, but for me, I feel we have to start instilling that back into our people. That pride. That black power. That privilege to be alive.

White Americans have the option of not having to think about race on a daily basis. People of color don't. Race is a major deciding factor in their lives and the histories of their families.

For black people, everything we do has to be ratified and endorsed by a power structure that is white. And that reinforces a kind of racial hierarchy where whiteness is the privileged position to be in, and ethnicity is problematic.

Too often, the very institutions that are supposed to protect and serve our community have instead failed people of color, specifically our black community.

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.

My mother had two unshakable beliefs that she tried to drill into me. The first was that I had to study and work twice as hard as my white peers if I wanted to survive in America, and the second was that it was delusional and dangerous to believe I possessed the same freedom white people had to pursue my dreams.

To be white in America is to have the confidence to say, without a second thought: this space, this neighborhood, this city, this county, this country is mine.

Americans live in a country where African-American young men are twenty-five times more likely to lose their lives at the hands of the police than their white counterparts.