Jess Row Quotes

If you took away the color of Barack Obama's skin, nobody right now would be paying him any attention.

I am not an American; I am one of twenty-two million black people who are victims of Americanism.

It isn't the American white man who is a racist, but it's the American political, economic and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.

Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.

The issue of racism and racial prejudice. It is very, very difficult to discuss. It is difficult to discuss the issue of apartheid. Many have made the observation that it is very difficult to find anyone in SA who ever supported apartheid because everyone was opposed, it was against our will and so on.

Racial oppression of black people in America has done what neither class oppression or sexual oppression, with all their perniciousness, has ever done: destroyed an entire people and their culture.

I never have a problem with being black. I have a problem with the easy association of what that means to some people.

If you are the normal white American, truth is you don't understand being black in America, and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk.

Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it. When you sustain that kind of affront, and sustain it and sustain it and sustain it, something happens to you. You try to steer a course in American society that's not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response. For anyone who is not white in America, the affronts are virtually across the board.

... all Americans are the prisoners of racial prejudice.

Racism is so extreme and so pervasive in our American society that no black individual lives in an atmosphere of freedom.

One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black. It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States... A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn't stand it anymore... I felt liberated in Paris.

Racism is not dead, but it is on life support -- kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as 'racists'

A part of being black in America and, you know, I presume being any minority, is constantly being told that we're being too aware of race somehow, we're obsessed with it or we're seeing racism where there just isn't racism.

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

White liberals are the most racist people there are, because they put blacks in a box and insist that they think one way - and if they don't, they attack them as illegitimate, all the while denying that their policies destroy blacks.

A lot of racism going on in the world right now. Who's more racist? Black people or white people? Black people. You know why? 'Cuz we hate black people too! Everything white people don't like about black people, black people really don't like about black people.

It is the attitude of the American white man that is making him stand condemned today before the eyes of the entire dark world and even before the eyes of the Europeans. It is his attitude, his haughty, holier-than-thou attitude.

It is very discouraging to be in a team with white athletes. On the track you are Tommie Smith, the fastest man in the world, but once you are in the dressing rooms you are nothing more than a dirty Negro.

Blacks don't square dance. If you see a black person square dancing, it is definitely the seventh sign.

It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.

Liberals see racism where it doesn't exist, fabricate it when they can't find it and ignore it within their own ranks.

I think that America certainly has racism, I think that any industrialized country does. But when you see how many million fans Barack Obama has who are not black, it would lead one to the conclusion that millions of Americans are in fact not burdened by the albatross of racism.

The thing is that it's always a constant reminder of how violent this country has been, always has been, you know. I'm still frustrated with these conversations: [Barack] Obama is black so that means this, that things are better, or it means that you voted for him because he's black.