Anna Deavere Smith Quotes

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.

Black Lives Matter is the culmination of racial divide. They're nothing more than the last socially acceptable hate group in America.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

If acknowledging that racial misgivings and misunderstandings are still a part of politics and life in America, I plead guilty.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

To the great majority of white Americans, the Negro problem has distinctly negative connotations. It suggests something difficult to settle and equally difficult to leave alone. It is embarrassing. It makes for moral uneasiness.

What is our greatest enemy? Segregation.

If black people mistrust white people, they are mistrusting racism, and that is appropriate.

I know my destiny. I was born into animosity, bigotry and hatred. We had water for white folks, and water for coloured folks. White lines, black lines. I came from Beaufort in South Carolina, and it was tougher than Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

All God’s dangers ain’t White men.

It is really my opinion that the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by the whites.

The color of your skin is your uniform in this ultimate battle for the survival of the West.

Although the race problem may seem to lie dormant at times, it continually exists, lives on and on and sometimes rages with all the fury of a jungle beast. It gnaws at the very vitals of our existence, in time it will sap our strength and destroy the greatness of our American way of life unless solved properly and permanently.

We never discuss race until something bad happens.

What whites cannot experience and may never understand is that no matter which side of the bed I chose to wake up on, I would still be a black man in the racially divisive America.

You get racism crossing the street; it's in the very fabric of American society.

Although slavery may have been abolished, the crippling poison of racism still persists, and the struggle still continues.

The fact that our country, the greatest country in the world, remains mired in race relations issues in the year 2014 is an embarrassment.

If we are to learn anything from the tragic death of Michael Brown, we must first acknowledge that we have a race issue we are not addressing.

On any given day, there's always something I'd rather be doing than facing the ugly, racist underbelly of America.

I'm from South Carolina. I'm from a real cultured state, where there's still racism daily. Still, places are segregated.

Racism can be called our nation's own specific 'original sin.'