Shelby Foote Quotes

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.

I am viewed as the Negro who has gone outside of the categories assigned to me.

A Negro girl could never be purely innocent. The vengeful Race Fairy always lurked nearby; your parents' best hope was that the fairy would show up at someone else's feast and punish their child. Parents had to protect themselves, too, and protect you from knowing how much danger you all were in.

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

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.

We don't have as much prejudice as we did 40 years ago, but today it is more educated.

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.

Would it be better if I'd married a Negro woman? Would they treat my child any better? Erect fewer barriers?

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.

I have never been able to discover anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient - in America.

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.

Discrimination is not just an ugly stain from this nation’s past. It’s still the reality of the present.

Racism in America has not been completely eradicated. It is a sturdy pestilence. Racism and intolerance raise their heads repeatedly, not only in America but in every land.

Thought the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resisted at every step of his progress.

You complain that Negroes are a base class. Who makes and keeps the Jew or the Negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the rights which others enjoy?

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

We are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North.

The Negro people, most exploited of the toilers, suffering from lynching and Jim Crowism, robbed of their constitutional rights, are being prepared to fight another war for 'democracy' in order to further enslave them.

The black herring of intermarriage has been dragged too often across the trail to justice. 'Would you want your sister to marry a nigger?' is still the question that is supposed to stun any white man who sponsors rights for Negroes. It stirs Negroes to ironic laughter, although on all levels they recognize the white man's fear of intermarriage as deep seated…

Racism was once just racism, a terrible bigotry that people nevertheless learned to live with, if not as a necessary evil then as an inevitable one. But the civil-rights movement, along with independence movements around the world, changed that.

Racism is old, but Peele found a poetic new way of talking about it. He gave us language we didn't know we lacked.

Racism is here and will always exist, but we can't use it as a crutch.

Segregation is not exclusion.

I think the most harmful belief passed on to me - not always directly - was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up.

I have to battle so many issues, and the biggest is racism.