Larry Wilmore Quotes

… the Mississippi Highway Patrol—some of those are Klansmen, a number of the chiefs of police and the sheriffs are, and therefore you can’t count on the local people to really extend any protection .

Why aren’t Black people this outraged over Black-on-Black killings?.

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder

Race remains a significant challenge in America.

I have the lived experience of a Black man in America, also raising Black kids, but I also have the lived experience of being a responsible person who is responsible for the resourcing and the outfitting of a law enforcement agency.

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

If you're getting harassed, it's not helpful to know that racism has generally declined in America, when you're still experiencing it. That is a reality that we're still vulnerable to.

In Crash, you've got a pathological cop who at the end justifies police brutality. He tells the naïve, young cop that you're going to end up the same as him. He's the most sympathetic character in the movie. So, the naïve cop ends up murdering this Black kid and tries to cover up the evidence. It sort of justifies police brutality and the planting of evidence which is what happened in the O.J. Simpson case.

I've had a dozen people tell me, maybe more, 'What would have happened if Michael Brown had shot and killed Darren Wilson? Do you think he would be free right now? Do you think he would not have been charged by now?' People just see this manifest double-standard in front of them that's coming at the long line of a whole bunch of grievances that have built up over time because of the dynamics of Ferguson and frankly, the dynamics of race in America more broadly.

'Crash' is a movie about the racial tension that still exists in America. A lot of us pretend that we don't have preconceived notions and stereotypical ideals about each other, but we do. And we wanted to create a movie about people whose lives crash into each others' accidentally.

I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.

I went to Zimbabwe. I know how white people feel in America now; relaxed! Cause when I heard the police car I knew they weren't coming after me!

We've begun to put fear into those whites who think they can do anything they want to a black person and get away with it.

I'm a black man in the United States of America, so I always feel like there's a target on me.

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, 'Look how far we've come,' because we hadn't come very far, to say the least. Although Jackson's population was half white and half black, I didn't have a single black friend or a black neighbor or even a black person in my school.

As a black man, you run from the cops. It's different now, but back when I was coming up, you run.

This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.

America is yours [Whites] today because of crime and violence.

It’s time we faced facts. Southern people just don’t like Black people.

… white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture (of private discrimination and segregation) that has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.

What whites cannot experience and may never understand is that no matter which side of the bed I chose to wake up on, I would still be a black man in the racially divisive America.

I knew a blond [white] girl once. She was far safer walking alone at night on the streets than she was walking with me, an incredibley humiliating experience for me. But it happens all the time in America.

Racialized oppression and dehumanization is woven into the very fabric of our nation — the effects of which can be seen in the lawful lynching of black and brown people by the police, and the mass incarceration of black and brown lives in the prison industrial complex,

It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.

I'm from Anderson, S.C., but I grew up in the South. So I know what it is to ride to school and have Confederate flags flying from trucks in front of me and behind me, to see a parking lot full of people with Confederate flags and know what that means. I've been stopped by police for no reason.