Sargent Shriver Quotes

The scars and stains of racism are still deeply embedded in the American society.

I think race in America is a huge one. That's something that needs to be confronted, certainly.

I don't think many people understand what racism is. The intellectuals use it like toilet paper; it's something they can use. It's not something they live.

While we dance in the streets and pat ourselves on the back for being a nation great enough to reach beyond racial divides to elect our first African-American president, let us not forget that we remain a nation still proudly practicing prejudice.

Let me just say that to imagine racism does not exist is imagination. And to imagine that it does not create its own set of problems is true imagination. So let's not imagine that racism is gone, extinguished, because it's not. We are seeing this in the top levels of the political arena, and we are seeing it very, very plainly.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

I feel that racial profiling may be a very complicated and long-standing problem. It will take a long time even to make tiny progress.

This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away.

There are plenty of African-Americans in this country - and I would say this goes right up to the White House - who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy.

It's hard to say when or if we will actually arrive at that place called 'post-racial', or, better yet, post-racism.

It’s time we faced facts. Southern people just don’t like Black people.

We can sugar-coat this any way we want to, but the reality is that there are some people who just don’t want a Black President.

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes

It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.

If you write about race in 1850, you end up talking about race today because in many ways, so little has changed.

In the black community, Trump's history of racial discrimination is deeply embedded.

Many thought that the abolition of slavery, the end of Jim Crow, and the legislative progress of the Civil Rights Era, among other watershed moments, would have fundamentally done away with the racist structures that have long oppressed black people. However, we know that has been far from the case.

There are not grades of racism. There's racism.

I think as a black woman, we have a lot of colorism going on around us, and we have a lot of racism as well.

We need to have a more thoughtful, two-sided conversation about racial issues in this country.

We know that racism and white privilege are both very much alive today.

People like to act like we don't have a legacy of racism here. I think people get really uncomfortable with it. We know that we can't change it unless we address that.

I've experienced racism and run-ins with the law, and it's a real thing, and it happens where I grew up. It's something that not a lot of people want to talk about. I feel like I have a duty, and I wouldn't be honest or true to myself if I didn't speak about it.