Thomas Sowell Quotes

President Obama, when he was elected, he could have been a unifying figure. He could have chosen to be a leader on race relations and bring us together. And he hasn't done that, he's made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions that have divided us rather than bringing us together.

We have the purveyors of hatred who take every single incident between people of two races and try to make a race war out of it and drive wedges into people. And this does not need to be done.

We cannot afford to weaponize race.

The share of Americans who say race relations are bad in this country is the highest it's been in decades, much of it amplified by shootings of African-Americans by police, as we've seen recently in Charlotte and Tulsa. Race has been a big issue in 2016 campaign.

That split is inside all Americans. There are contradictions inside all of us about color and race. We've learned to cover them up and live with them and pretend that deep cleavage is not there. We all bear that illness.

Some people want to have controversy between the races.

When Dylann Roof walked into a black church, he wanted to start a race war. We didn't let him do that because we didn't cast him as a representative of the white race. We didn't give into his narrative. We did the exact opposite. And I think that we have to be careful not to give into the apocalyptic narrative of ISIS that wants to start a war between Muslims and everybody else.

Yet it seems that a final race struggle is unavoidable

You'd have civil war. You'd have a race war in this country.

The national media which I consider to be very racist against European Americans and I think they have caused the incitement of African Americans against European Americans.I also think that they have also facilitated European Americans being angry at African Americans.

You also had in Detroit that summer, an early variation of Ferguson. A black prostitute was shot in the back by police. And all of the efforts that a very progressive police chief and mayor of that period had put into trying to restore race relations started to fall apart again, and you could see that unraveling for several years until the riots or rebellion of 1967.

If I have learned one thing from life, it is that race is the engine that drives the political Left. When all else fails, that segment of America goes to the default position of using race to achieve its objectives. In the courtrooms, on college campuses, and, most especially, in our politics, race is a central theme. Where it does not naturally rise to the surface, there are those who will manufacture and amplify it.

This is why integration will not work. It assumes that the two races, black and white, are equal and can be made to live as one. This is not true.

The Negro neighborhood, which is inferior, is begging for a chance to - integrate itself into that which is - is superior, which is not going to happen. It's going to cause trouble.

The Indian is but a sketch in red crayon of a rudimental manhood. To the problem of his relation to the white race, there is one solution: extermination.

Even when black youth gangs target white strangers on the streets and spew out racial hatred as they batter them and rob them, mayors, police chiefs and the media tiptoe around their racism and many in the media either don't cover these stories or leave out the race and racism involved.

Aye, you white dog, you are like all your race; but to a black man gold can never pay for blood.

What about those [Donald] Trump supporters out there and we've seen several incidents of this, with racially-charged intimidation of students and things like that? Doesn't President-Elect Trump have some responsibility to say something about that?

Part of it is eight years of a black president, and white America still lost their [minds] about that. Part of it is a Republican politics of vicious, vicious partisan [stuff] that has completely poisoned what we would call the political rhetorical sphere. All of these things come together in a perfect storm.

I think I was just too young to even understand what was going on. When I was still living in South Africa, there was still so much racial tension.

You look at the violence that is taking place in the inner cities of Chicago. You take a look at Washington, D.C. We have an increase in murder within our cities. The biggest in 45 years. We have a divided nation because people like her and believe me, she has tremendous hate in her heart.

Those who automatically say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty discrimination and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse. But there were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then.

...A long struggle lies in store for me in this field of color.

We are about to have a racial explosion.