Justin Simien Quotes

In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.

Ours has not been a racially democratic society for 300 years.

Some issues just need to be dealt with - that we're still dealing with in the world, with police brutality and racism.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

Racism has its boot squarely wedged on the neck of black communities, and we don't want to be told that hard work and responsibility are the answer.

The reality is we have allowed systemic racism to continue through all these years.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

We must confront our own racism. Discriminatory housing and employment policies are nothing more than institutionalised racism.

I hate to say this about the Republican establishment, but their view of Civil Rights is to tip the black waiter five bucks at the country club.

Resolved, that the Government of the United States, the nation with its institutions, of right belong to the white men who now possess them.

Segregation of schools is no accident.

Apartheid is alive and well and it lives in our schools, and I'm sad to say it lives in the halls of the State legislature.

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

A Negro has handicaps enough without having to pay taxes to support the education of white students to learn how to suppress him.

He shatters the myth of white supremacy once and for all.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

I suggest that what has happened to the white Southerner is in some ways much worse than what has happened to the Negroes there ... One has to assume that he is a man like me, but he does not know what drives him to use the club, to menace with a gun, and to use a cattle prod against a woman's breasts ... Their moral lives have been destroyed by a plague called color.

You spend your whole lifetime in your occupation, actually making life clever, easy and convenient for white people. But when you have to get transportation home, you are denied an equal accommodation. Our existence was for the white man's comfort and well-being; we had to accept being deprived of just being human.

Freedom in America was not always flat. Racism made it un-flat, so that some people had privileges over other people.

You know what, man, that's part and parcel of being a black person in this country: everything's harder. It just is.

As much as we want to say racism is dead, it's still rearing its ugly head constantly.

One of the most subtle but aggressive ways racism exists is through our education system.

Racism plagued America throughout the '60s, into the '70s, through the '80s; it continued in the '90s and in the first decade of the new millennium; and it persists today.