Langston Hughes Quotes

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.

Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another.

The diversity industry needs friction to survive, so it perpetually reworks the definition of racism.

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.

In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.

Racism exists everywhere. So when people act surprised about racism, I'm the one that's surprised.

Racism has its boot squarely wedged on the neck of black communities, and we don't want to be told that hard work and responsibility are the answer.

Growing up in a system that tells you just because of your skin colour you are not good enough - you learn at a very young age to toughen up.

For generations, black children have been brought up to have a critical race consciousness, a framework for dealing with prejudice and discrimination, which helps inoculate them against the spiritual toxins they will almost certainly encounter as they come of age in our society.

The reality is we have allowed systemic racism to continue through all these years.

Racism plagued America throughout the '60s, into the '70s, through the '80s; it continued in the '90s and in the first decade of the new millennium; and it persists today.

We need to recognize that racism has never been subtle, though it has gone underreported.

Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Do you know that there are libraries in our country that will not stock a book by a Negro writer, not even as a gift? There are towns where Negro newspapers and magazines cannot be sold except surreptitiously. There are American magazines that have never published anything by Negroes. There are film studios that have never hired a Negro writer. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

The only difference between me and those other great Yankees is my skin color.

The truth is, no, we don't live in a post-racial state anywhere in America, and this is particularly true in Hollywood.

Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.

When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.

Racism is if there are spectators or, outside the field of play, there are movements to discrimination, but, on the field of play, I deny that there is racism.

I don't think many people understand what racism is. The intellectuals use it like toilet paper; it's something they can use. It's not something they live.

If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.

Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.