W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

The white people of the South are the greatest minority in this nation. They deserve consideration and understanding instead of the persecution of twisted propaganda.

Black people don't know what white people are talking about when they talk about a Sister Souljah moment. I tell them it's the moment you meet a proud, beautiful black woman you can never forget.

There's sort of a persistent misperception that talking about race is black folk's burden. Ultimately, only men can end sexism, and only white people can end racism.

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

The slaves had food stamps, too. It was called 'scraps from Massa's table.'

One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

White people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet.

Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.

I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.

Most of black America is in housing projects, without jobs, living on welfare. And this is not the case in 'The Cosby Show,' because all the values in that household are strictly what I would call white American values.

Wealthy men, too, like several of those in our neighborhood, had so many slaves that they were compelled to buy other plantations on which to employ them.

American women who know the history of this country will always resent the fact that American men chose to enfranchise Negroes fresh from slavery before enhancing their wives and mothers.

Use all the Negroes you can get for ... cooking, digging, chopping and such. But don't arm them. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.

Don’t play with us. If you’re not going to give us justice, let us go so that we may help ourselves….We can’t want for benevolent white people to give us handouts.

Nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of any other color of men; and that the appearance of the want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence.

The only difference between the Negro slave of the South, and the white wage slave of the North is, that the one has a master without asking for him, and the other has to beg for the privilege of becoming a slave.... The one is the slave of an individual; the other is the slave of an inexorable class.

The condition of white people in this State is such that they must labor in competition with the negro laborer.

I know that there is a visionary dogma which holds that negro slaves cannot be the subject of property. I shall not dwell on the speculative abstraction. That IS property which the law declares TO BE property. Two hundred years of legislation have sanctified and sanctioned negro slaves as property.

I have never been able to procure sufficient slaves to cultivate my lands and that of any guilt that attached to this trade we [planters] were at most but partners with the Parliament which tolerated it, and the country which profited so much from it.

The grievance in their mind is the animus, the anger. They hate white people because white people are successful and they're not.

Black people were so angry at me. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good black people. The world just isn't like that.

“Slavery always degrades labor. The white people who work with their hands are ranked with the other laborers— the slaves ... They feel that they are degraded and despised.

To be white and male is not to be sexist and racist.

We are born with freedom and hope, but often that's dashed because of our color. But in school, I'd already been taught that no one could tell me that you can't do something because you're black.

Normally, 'black responsibility' is a forbidden phrase for a black leader -- not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites.