Jesse Williams Quotes

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.

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

It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.

There's no such thing as racial, non-white supremacy.

I think we are aware that post-racialism isn't real, right? I mean, I hope so. I kind of joke that we're post-post-racial.

I think it's extremely important to challenge white brothers and sisters and think more systematically and strategically about the whiteness that they possess.

Why must we always talk about race anyway? Can't we just be human beings? And Professor Hunk replied - that is exactly what white privilege is, that you can say that. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.

I'm against an all-white anything or an all-black anything.

The greatest problem is not with flat-out white racists, but rather with the far larger number of Americans who believe intellectually in racial equality but are quietly oblivious to injustice around them.

Traditionally, I have no right to talk about race. I'm white; I didn't grow up in an all-black neighborhood. But the license I see for myself is I'm a member of the world.

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

What man or woman of common sense now doubts the intellectual capacity of colored people? Who does not know, that with all our efforts as a nation to crush and annihilate the mind of this portion of our race, we have never yet been able to do it.

People have got to get together and work together. I'm tired of the kind of oppression that white people have inflicted on us and are still trying to inflict.

By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.

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.

In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.

When we understand [that] American democracy and white supremacy are inextricably linked, we can see how tortuous our efforts have been to accommodate the value gap.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

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

A race-transcendent politics is most likely to succeed when the white community takes responsibility for overcoming its racism, not when the black community decides to forget it.

This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis ... made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.’

Until racial justice and freedom is a reality in this land, our union will remain profoundly imperfect.... The Negro is going to get justice or this society will be ripped apart.

Now in speaking like this, it doesn't mean that we're anti-white, but it does mean we're anti-exploitation, we're anti-degradation, we're anti-oppression. And if the white man doesn't want us to be anti-him, let him stop oppressing and exploiting and degrading us.

Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.

Nobody really loves America more than black Americans, because black Americans loved America even when America didn’t love us back