Joe Morton Quotes

People think I'm this angry black man walking around in a constant state of rage.

I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they're looting, if you see a white family it says they're looking for food.

When I was a kid, no one would believe anything positive that you could say about black people. That's a terrible burden.

In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love.

I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.

There's so many, 'no, black people aren't like that' barriers in mainstream media.

It doesn't even feel like racism is real. It just feels like the weirdest ploy, like we're just being had on so many levels. It's even kind of funny when you think about it. A reason not to like someone is 'because you're black.' C'mon, man. How dumb is that?

Systemic racism is something that diminishes all of us. Of course its worst effects are for its victims, but our entire country is held back through the inequality and the mistrust that it creates.

The media really only pays attention to white people. I think America is really racist.

The only crime I'm guilty of is being a young black woman.

'I Spy' represents the absence of the tension of the black man or black woman or anyone of that color walking in, so that the white racist person can become entertaining to a viewer.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

Any time I claimed to be white, that would be unacceptable. It just doesn't make sense in people's minds. If I'm white, how can I walk through a department store and still have people scared that I'm going to rob them? Which, that can still happen.

As an African-American, I know all too well the negative thoughts and feelings hatred and bigotry cause.

I felt pretty good growing up. I didn't feel a lot of prejudice or racism. But I do remember, if there was going to be a movie or a television show with Asian characters, I would go out of my way to avoid them, because they portrayed all Asians as either ridiculously good or ridiculously bad; you know, the whole Charlie Chan-Fu Manchu thing.

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

I feel that racial profiling may be a very complicated and long-standing problem. It will take a long time even to make tiny progress.

The white man, in his press, is going to identify me with 'hate.'

There will always be that dreadful monster prejudice to do extra battle against because of their color.

But when I see a story on welfare on television, they only show black people.

The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

The Afro-American is not a bestial race.