W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and separation of the white and black races.

This problem, which exists because of the presence of … Negroes in this country, can be permanently solved only by the physical separation of the races or by resigning ourselves to total mongrelization resulting in the destruction of both the white and black races

Have we become inoculated with prejudice of race that an American government professedly based on the principles of freedom ... can make distinctions between such citizens ... simply because of their respective races?

We call each other colored people, black people, but not negro…

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development.

The Problem We All Live With

The collective memory of race relations in the United States overlooks and omits the reality of mixed race. There existed a squeamishness, a disgust, a denouncement of “race mixing” that sparked riots, instituted legal prohibitions, and constructed categories, each of which insist upon the genealogical separation of black, white, and red.

I went to high school in Frisco, Texas, where a lot of people look the same, dress the same, act the same. People are either like, 'You're not black enough for this' or 'You're not white enough for this.'

The enormous success of 2009's 'The Blind Side,' in which Sandra Bullock makes a black teenager one of the family, demonstrates that America isn't post-racial. It is thoroughly mired in race - the myths that surround it, the guilt it inspires, the discomfort it causes, the struggle to transcend it.

I read so much stuff that black women say, especially about my relationship. 'Oh, he left his black wife to go be with some exotic chick.' First of all, my girl is black: she's Jamaican.

Just call me black, if you want to call me anything.

I do remember being teased by my cousins on my mom's side for not being black enough. And then I'd spend the summer with my dad and be sent to all white summer camps where I was 'that black girl.'

I am so used to having two faces. A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face.

Some white people hate black people, and some white people love black people, some black people hate white people, and some black people love white people. So you see it's not an issue of black and white, it's an issue of Lovers and Haters.

Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.

I've never been one to carry race on my sleeve, and I've never been one to really use my race.

When I'm around black or white people, I'm always in the middle. Especially when I am around black people; they will really tell how they feel about white people regardless of the fact that I'm also white and have white relatives. It's very interesting and can be really hard.

That's the way blacks have been encouraged to think: that we got to stick together. You've got a situation today where if a black person says he thinks O.J. Simpson's guilty, other blacks will cut their eyes at him and say, 'You ought to go somewhere and sit down and shut up.'

It's very hard to be black in this country and hate America. It's really hard to live like that. I would actually argue it's impossible to fully see yourself.

If black or red skins or any other skin of color is disgraceful to God, it appears that he has disgraced himself a great deal—for he has made fifteen colored people to one white and placed them here upon this earth.

If social equality should be granted and intermarriage should become a matter of individual taste, then the pride of race and the sense of blood superiority which has heretofore protected the Southern whites would be destroyed.

Lincoln’s talking nigger citizenship!

One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings.

Blacks—across the economic and ideological spectrum—often feel astonishingly vulnerable, of accusations of disloyalty to race.

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.