Sherman Alexie Quotes

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

If you’re talking about American history, you’re talking about race.

If you want to understand America, it's slavery.

I did a paper on why is race so uncomfortable to discuss. Is it because you don't want to bring up bad history in America? You want to be conscious of whatever you say about that because it's a serious point.

The truth is, no, we don't live in a post-racial state anywhere in America, and this is particularly true in Hollywood.

My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

However, while we should certainly celebrate the demise of overt official racism, we must also critically examine where we are at this historical moment, recognize the many challenges ahead and reaffirm our commitment to making Brown v. Board a reality.

If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.

White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.

There's only one free person in this society, and he is white and male.

Sometimes black people really want to hold onto our oppression - 'This is ours! This belongs to us.' You can't just talk about equality for somebody else. Let's pass it on. Let's pass it on to somebody else. At the end of the day, it is all about inequality.

It is true that as people, we tend to remember only the positive. With time, the grim details fade away, and as a species we survive on this notion. In our desire to gloss over the undeniable macabre parts of our American history, we forget. That amnesia manifests itself, especially when dealing with the plight of black men.

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

Terrorism is not new to black people.

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

If I were white, I could capture the world.

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.

Education in this country is about how to maintain the status quo and to perpetuate racism.

I was fortunate enough to have been raised to a certain point before I got into the race thing. I had other views of what a human is, so I was never able to see racism as the big question. Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life.

I definitely think the fact that I come from a multicultural background, my mother living life in a white skin and having white skin privilege from the time I was little, I was aware of that.

In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.

It's not the people in the South who create racial problems - it's the people who are governing.

Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risks of infection.