Andre Gide Quotes

I remember classes in college where the professor was espousing certain theories about how blacks were inherently less intelligent. But I learned a long time ago to give people the benefit of the doubt, not to assume that somebody was reacting to you because of race.

Perhaps the little Negro girl was holding a concealed razor blade. Maybe she was one of the troublemakers out for a fresh white scalp.

Lots of white people think black people are stupid. They are stupid themselves for thinking so, but regulation will not make them smarter.

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

But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target

Santa Claus was white and everything bad was black. The little ugly duckling was the black duck, and the black cat was the bad luck. And if I threaten you, I'm going to blackmail you.I said, 'Momma, why don't they call it 'whitemail'? They lie too.'

People are taking it for granted that [the Negro] ought not to work with his head. And it is so easy for these people among whom we are living to believe this; it flatters and satisfies their self-complacency.

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.

I was in Toronto when they had a severe outbreak of SARS - you know, Severe Asian Racism Syndrome. I was in the airport and there were these big snowboarder guys and they had white masks around their necks, and as soon as they saw me, they put their masks on. So I went "cough, cough, cough... You wanna egg rorr?

America is a white man's country.

Labels applied to people of any race are inherently offensive.

The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.

These people didn't know anything about black people, so the only thing they could imagine was the worst thing.

I mean, we're not talking about simply racism, we're taking about white supremacy.

These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.

He was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilized whites and hence should be excluded from future games.

Now, personally, I am baffled by the concept of racial prejudice. Why hate someone based on the color of their skin when, if you take the time to get to know them as a human being, you can find so many other things to hate them for?

it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize.

We're conditioned in this country to believe that if there's a problem, the black man is usually the culprit.

There's no such thing as reverse racism.

Racism springs from ignorance.

I had this stereotypical view that black people apart from me probably threw stones and lived in huts.

Well, I had to do it becasue somebody had to do something becasue, you know, black people are killing white people every day on teh streets, and they rape white women, 100 white women a day.

Maybe Mexicans are lazy except when they’re taking everyone’s jobs.

A smart black guy is confronting for most people. But that's on them, not on me.