Montel Williams Quotes

We need to dismantle the systems that were built on racism, that were built on the backs of black people.

I was born on an island with 96 percent of the people black. But all the power and the economy was in the hands of white people who only formed four per cent.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?

I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It's harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.

When the world's moving towards being the most inclusive it's ever been, it's unthinkable that certain basic aspects of life are still so unfair for the black community.

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.

The journey of making 'Hidden Figures' has shown me the automatic privilege that all white men are afforded in America in 2017 and in any and every year before that.

A lot of people of color and the Black Lives Matter movement will talk about what's really happening, but it seems like you can't get the black president to say something that's obvious about what's happening to black people in this country.

Black people cannot look to government to solve their problems.

If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.

We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

Sadly, whites are rarely open to what black and brown folks have to say regarding their ongoing experiences with racist mistreatment. And we are especially reluctant to discuss what that mistreatment means for us as whites: namely that we end up with more and better opportunities as the flipside of discrimination.

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

Tonight the Negro knows from his radio and television that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson [Mississippi] he cannot even drive a garbage truck.

There's not a white man in this country who can say he never benefited from being white.

I don't want our white working class sisters and brothers to feel as though their pain is not important because it is. But at the same time, I want my white sisters and brothers to understand that when we talk about income and wealth inequality, that disproportionately African Americans suffer a little more.

When I grew up in West Baltimore, anything associated - and I'm talking about my childhood - with white people 99 percent of the time was something malevolent, like it was an explanatory force for something bad.

I have never been what you would call just an integrationist. I know I've been called that... Integrating that bus wouldn't mean more equality. Even when there was segregation, there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us.

As a white man who has had privileges that others could not depend on or take for granted, I've clearly had advantages over the course of my life.

Many thought that the abolition of slavery, the end of Jim Crow, and the legislative progress of the Civil Rights Era, among other watershed moments, would have fundamentally done away with the racist structures that have long oppressed black people. However, we know that has been far from the case.

A lot of people are quick to say that saying 'black lives matter' makes you anti-cop. All lives should indeed matter, but we have a systemic problem in this country in which black lives do not matter enough.