Richard Spencer Quotes

Every day in America, African Americans are reminded of their race in ways large and small. Every day.

I think some people feel that if you question the reality of race, you're questioning racism; you're saying racism isn't real. Racism is real because people actually believe race is real. We'd have to really let go of the 500-year-old idea of race as a worldview in order to undo racism.

People sometimes ask me if I would not give anything to be white, I answer, in the words of the song, most emphatically, 'No.' How do I know what I might be if I were a white man? I might be a sand-hog, burrowing away and losing my health for $8 a day. I might be a street-car conductor at $12 or $15 a week. There is many a white man less fortunate and less well equipped than I am. In fact, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient - in America.

If you're African American, you are forced into making different choices, in a lot of cases, than you are as a white person.

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this.

White supremacy is not just a social arrangement: it is a race-based faith.

If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

There will always be that dreadful monster prejudice to do extra battle against because of their color.

The Afro-American is not a bestial race.

Blacks essentially play the race card, when necessary as a counter to white privilege.

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

I thought the Navy at times resembled a Southern plantation that had somehow escaped the Civil War. Blacks swabbed the decks, shined shoes, did the cooking, washed the dishes, and served the food. Virtually no other jobs were open to them.

Thought the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resisted at every step of his progress.

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.

When you will explain why, in His wisdom, He made one mountain overtop another mountain--formed one ocean larger than another ocean--planned one valley wider than another valley; when you can make me understand why He made the oak stronger than its neighbor--the rainbow more beautiful than the storm-cloud--the lily more lovely than the lilac; when you will tell me the reason that Providence ordained that the fair Saxon should be permitted to express, in the blush upon her face, all the emotions of her soul, while the African knows not the signification of the word--when these things are made clear to me, I will tell you how and why He has made the African the servant of the Anglo-Saxon race, but not till then. They were born and bred servants, they cannot be masters

The Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination

The Negro wants a revision of the concept of race and of racism. Discriminations in industry, labor unions, education, the Jim Crow pattern for the Army and Navy are based upon fascist racism …. There will have to be education on the subject of race. We shall have to learn that the doctrine of racism has no scientific foundations ...

I think it's impossible to be a young black male from the South, born to an era I was born in, and not have a clear sense of what race really means in the country.

College was where I got to actually experience the difference between black and white.

One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won't succeed.

You know what? As a black person, you see so much racism. Films are no different than the government, politics - it's everywhere. It's not exclusively film. It's infuriating to see it in film. But my being in film changes things.

Being a little kid, you don't hear much about racism. You figure everybody's the same. If racism isn't taught, you're just a black kid and a white kid together.

I don't believe in reverse racism. I really don't.

The ingrained image of black men being searched by the police feeds into the collective illusion that black men everywhere need to be policed more than others.

I cannot imagine what it must feel like to be treated differently because of the color of my skin.