Hank Aaron Quotes

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.

I wasn't aware of Ku Klux Klan as I was aware of the widespread assumption that African-Americans were dumber than white people. I think my father believed that. I think everybody white did.

Have the colored people done anything to justify the prejudice against them that does exist in the hearts of so many white persons and, generally, of one great political party in this country? Have they done anything to justify it? No, sir.

We are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... he has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

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

The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.

In spite of what some people claim, we are not in a post-racial era. I think it's still an important issue to bring up.

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.

Whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior.

We're not so much anti-black as we are pro-white.

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

There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.

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

I think the most harmful belief passed on to me - not always directly - was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up.

White consciousness is deeply anti-black, and that's for progressives and conservatives.

If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.

I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.

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.

Clearly, the Obama presidency hasn't wiped out racial prejudices.

Seems to me that the institutions that function in this country are clearly racist, and that they're built upon racism.

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.

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.

Would it be better if I'd married a Negro woman? Would they treat my child any better? Erect fewer barriers?