Malcolm X Quotes

At this moment, then, the Negroes must begin to do the very thing which they have been taught that they cannot do.

I'm not going to play a racial game. With me, you're going to meet a guy named Shelby Steele, and you will have to get to know me as an individual. The color of my skin won't tell you anything. I think there's more and more of that in America.

I never held Negroes to be inherently inferior. The statement in Marriage and Morals refers to environmental conditioning. I have had it withdrawn from subsequent editions because it is clearly ambiguous.

I remember classes in college where the professor was espousing certain theories about how blacks were inherently less intelligent. But I learned a long time ago to give people the benefit of the doubt, not to assume that somebody was reacting to you because of race.

I just don't feel the whole white guilt and pussy-footing around race issues. I'm completely above all that. I've never worried about what anyone might think of me 'cause I've always believed that the true of heart recognize the true of heart.

I think "post-racial" is a dangerous trap. You can fall into complacency and give your complicity a much more dangerous character.

People approach people of color with preconceived ideas. I don't think this is just restricted to white people, but I think that lots of black and white artists, when race is a subject matter, they put race or the ideology around race first. They don't see the person and the complications of the human being.

All is race - there is no other truth.

We should not be post-racial: seeking to get beyond the uplifting meanings and edifying registers of blackness. Rather, we should be post-racist: moving beyond cultural fascism and vicious narratives of racial privilege and superiority that tear at the fabric of "e pluribus unum.

The whites are the same everywhere. I see them every day.

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

I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

I will lay off the pro-Negro crap.

I've always been talking about race in some sort of capacity.

The problem with most liberals - myself included - is we tend to think we're post-racial: that we've got a handle on things because we're not racists.

I don't think that the "freedom movement" is a racist movement as such. But it's a virulent example of identity politics. "Whiteness" is part of the identity, but not the most important part.

I don't know what to say about Asians. I think everyone is "racist," to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at (for example skin color, bone structure), but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.

It is strange, is it not, how the more strenuously we deny the importance of race in human affairs, the more obsessed with it and the touchier on the subject we grow.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

It so happens that I never talk about race. I do not know what race is.

If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.

I said, "If I was a Negro girl-" He placed his fingers across my lips so I tasted his saltiness. "We can't think of changing our skin," he said. "Change the world-that's how we gotta think."

If you truly believe in the brotherhood of man, then you must believe that blacks are just as capable of being racists as whites are.

Kids know nothing about racism. They're taught that by adults.

I never have a problem with being black. I have a problem with the easy association of what that means to some people.