John McWhorter Quotes

The dysfunction of African-Americans is directly related to the fact that African-Americans as a racial group are no longer needed to bolster the economy as they were in slavery days.

I saw a lot of people of color who didn't study hard because they said the government would take care of them.

Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.

He missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow

The history of black America was from slavery, oppression, civil rights, and you felt kind of isolated as an entity in our country.

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.

Racism cannot be cured solely by attacking some of the results it produces, like discrimination in housing or in education.

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

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

The worst disease from which the society of our nation suffers is ... the treatment of the Negro.

Although the race problem may seem to lie dormant at times, it continually exists, lives on and on and sometimes rages with all the fury of a jungle beast. It gnaws at the very vitals of our existence, in time it will sap our strength and destroy the greatness of our American way of life unless solved properly and permanently.

Modern technical civilization does not seem to be as well handled by the black man as by the white man in the United States

African American Communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they've ever been before. Ever, ever, ever.

Racialized oppression and dehumanization is woven into the very fabric of our nation — the effects of which can be seen in the lawful lynching of black and brown people by the police, and the mass incarceration of black and brown lives in the prison industrial complex,

Being black in America - especially as I was growing up - the feeling of oppression, the feeling of being outcast, the feeling of not having a voice was part of my life.

Far from ending, systemic racism reinvents itself to conform to what is publically acceptable, leaving the quality of black life diminished and more permanently fixed with each passing decade.

The humanity that is given to other people isn't given to us. There is an expendability that comes along with being African American.

The default of our society is the reproduction of racial inequality. I mean, that's what it does; that's what it's been doing for hundreds of years.

The poor black people in it make the black people in Gone With the Wind look like Malcolm X.

We have to face up to systemic racism. We see it in jobs, we see it in education, we see it in housing. But let's be really clear; it's a big part of what we're facing in the criminal justice system.

We have gaps that are rooted in systemic racism.

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.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

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