John Ridley Quotes

Barack Obama would not be President if he were dark skin. You know what I mean? That's just the truth. I might not be as successful as I am now if I was dark skin.

I found this out over the years, that racism is a thinly veiled disguise over economics and money. It really is.

We're conditioned in this country to believe that if there's a problem, the black man is usually the culprit.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

If I were white, I'd get less criticism.

You know, I always say white is not a colour, white is an attitude, and if you haven't got trillions of dollars in the bank that you don't need, you can't be white.

I believe in the law. I think we have a great system of justice. But I do think that system of justice has been corrupted by racism and classism. I think it's difficult for 'poor people' - poor white people, brown people - to be treated fairly before the law in the same way that upper-class people are.

I think that racism has gotten more subtle, and it's not even racism anymore: it's placism. Like where you live or whether you went to community college or Harvard, and it exists within the race.

I myself am a descendant of the European tribes, now called nations, that have established political, military, and economic dominance over the world. I confess to my sin of privilege and my reluctance to forego the perks my race and class afford me.

In the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black office seekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal chief, a foreign Muslim — in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to be our president — is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never brought against any of his predecessors.

Some white people are privileged, some aren't. Some black people are, some aren't. It's strikes me as, by definition, a racist attack in that it's making a generalization - a negative one - based on skin color.

That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one's kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.

There's not enough opportunity, and I feel like you can't control where you're born or where you're brought up.

The idea that there is a meritocracy where anyone from any background really might have the social and economic mobility to rise to the top in Silicon Valley, those are antithetical to a lot of the principles that the Trump administration apparently stands for.

People say, 'I'm tired of thinking about race, it's a drag.' Yeah, well, welcome to my life! I don't care who you are. We have the time and the headspace for this stuff. The least you can do is take a moment.

I used to be obsessed with race. I'm more obsessed with class now.

Class and the snobbery it provokes still matter far too much in Britain, but we are a far more mobile society than we used to be.

You are not born racist. You are born into a racist society. And like anything else, if you can learn it, you can unlearn it. But some people choose not to unlearn it, because they're afraid they'll lose power if they share with other people. We are afraid of sharing power. That's what it's all about.

People bring it up to me: 'Well, you're only in your spot because you can talk well.' Okay, first off, you could be right. But second, what - am I supposed to apologize for this? No.

I have a class prejudice - against the upper class, which is foolish.

So many people, you know, they're just worried about, you can't say something bad about Obama, not because you actually have a strong stance against his platform, but because that makes you a racist.

I think we are aware that post-racialism isn't real, right? I mean, I hope so. I kind of joke that we're post-post-racial.

We justify the inequalities by saying some people are just better and smarter than others and the strong should survive and the poor can die off.

Truth is, only the useless get to the top in this country.

People say to me 'you're successful, what are you crying about?'. I'm crying about the people. I'm crying about their daughters. Our daughters, as one family. What good is it. What good is anything that everyone can't have. Every ism. They think we're done with racism. What about elitism, what about separatism, what about classism? That's all.