Barack Obama Quotes

When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?

Much of the professed concern about the white working class is a cover for the interests of white elites who evoke working-class solidarity to combat racial, sexual and gender progress.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old - is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

So, to say Barack Obama is progress is saying that he's the first black person that is qualified to be president. That's not black progress. That's white progress.

They oughtta change Black History Month to Black Progress Month and start measuring it.

I remember sitting there on my father's couch or my mother's couch, listening to this lecture about how there were two groups and we had to be separated. We've come a long way from this kind of open racism. And I think it's wonderful.

I think the race situation is getting better as far as people respecting each other goes. I think the race situation with entertainment is not that much better.

I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.

I, for one, would think both about how far we have come as a country and how much further we need to go to erase racism and discrimination from our society.

'The Cosby Show' - no one thought there's doctors and lawyers who are married and live in brownstones! Back then no one would have thought we would have an African-American president. They would have laughed in your face.

The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished.

Every race has fought for its own progress.

We are justified in believing that the success of this movement for equality of the sexes means more progress toward equality of the races.

If someone had told me in 1963 that in 50 years we would see a Black man in the white house, I would have said “You’re crazy! You are not living in the real world.”

The world changes. The world is completely different now from when I was growing up. Back then, you didn't say things like they say now, out loud, about race and things. But that's just progress. When are we going to find out that we're all the same - we're all absolutely, without a doubt, the same?

I have a vision of my country, and I cannot sit and watch things pass by.

I momentarily but genuinely believed that Barack Obama was the answer not only to our nation's depressing politics but to the question of our racial enlightenment.

The black conservative is responsible for making people question an idea that racism must be extinct before black people can overcome. Understanding that our goal is to thrive despite racism rather than fetishizing it is, in fact, the central ideological plank of people deemed "black conservatives." This is a coherent position, but that can be hard to perceive, given the way that race has been discussed in our land over the past 40 years or so.

It's weird because there is progress somehow. But there's so much that just feels the same. How important is that rank? How important is it that I am allowed to make these decisions? What does that really mean? What is progress? Is it progress that a black guy gets to push a button for the nuclear bomb? Is that progress? Maybe, I don't know.

It's undeniable there's been remarkable progress for African-Americans in this country. They've been elected senators and governors and running major corporations. But obviously we still have a long way to go.

I am absolutely convinced that race relations on the whole are actually better now than they were 20 years [ago].

The feelings, myths and prejudices about the Negro American which now seem so valid and real to some of our white contemporaries will take their place on the shelf along with the belief in witches and the notion that the earth is the center of the solar system.  Nobody knows as yet whether the future [of the race situation] is hopeless. All we know is that it can be made hopeless, if enough people choose to consider it so.

The wisest among my race understand that agitations of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.

Should a community... be free to enact legislation to say they don't want blacks? Now that's illegal. Fifty years ago it was legal. Is that progress or is that regress?

You could feel America starting to ease up a little bit on racism, against blacks in certain pockets, and then suddenly The Cosby Show bubbled up and it was the right time for it.