Kerry James Marshall Quotes

So many white people don't want to talk about race; it's uncomfortable. Many reason that slavery happened more than a century ago, and people alive today had nothing to do with it. But the particulars of these stories, from slavery to segregation to civil rights and mass incarceration, are at the marrow of life in America today.

We question these issues of race and struggle and white privilege because we know that those issues are real and because those issues have real implications in black communities. And white supremacy is not only dangerous, but it is deadly.

The black community sees itself as one group, and they are all experiencing the same experiences as a group with racism and whatnot, growing up in this country.

Being white is a job in America. You take that away, you better get the soldiers out.

If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

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.

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.

The white race must be supreme, not only in America but in the world.

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

This nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.

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.

So white guilt is not a guilt of conscience; it's not something that you get up in the morning and say, my God, I feel guilty about what happened to black Americans. Rather it is the fact that in relation to black Americans you lack moral authority.

There are so many - namely black and brown bodies - who have experienced a different America than what the mainstream American flag symbolizes.

White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress.

White Americans today don't know what in the world to do because when they put us behind them, that's where they made their mistake... they put us behind them, and we watched every move they made.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

America is racial. America was founded on race. Race is America. The code name for America is 'race.'

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

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.

Sometimes I wonder if I got lulled into not wanting things because I grew up black in this country.

Liberal whites are the greatest enemy of African Americans.

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

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.

Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.