Bell Hooks Quotes

It was impossible to reason with a negro-that the only way to keep him in his place was to keep him under fear.

White supremacy is the conscious or unconscious belief or the investment in the inherent superiority of some, while others are believed to be innately inferior. And it doesn't demand the individual participation of the singular bigot. It is a machine operating in perpetuity, because it doesn't demand that somebody be in place driving.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

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.

There is no birthright in the white skin that it shall say that wherever it goes, to any nation, amongst any people, there the people of the country shall give way before it, and those to whom the land belongs shall bow down and become its servants.

Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to racial prejudice and the personal actions that result. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.

If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.

I look at racism as one of the social demons. And, in its worst, it's violent and it's a systemic commitment to oppression.

Racism keeps people who are being managed from finding out the truth through contact with each other.

So now I'm going to forget the 400 years of lynching and killing raping and depriving my people feeding of justice and equality and the lowest of low last respect and I'm going to look at two or three white people who are trying to do right and don't see the other million who are trying to kill me? I'm not that big of a fool.

Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.

Sexism and racism are parallel problems. You can compare them in some ways, but they're not at all the same. But they're both symptoms inside the white male power structure.

The racism is so profound and the recognition - the kind of deep recognition that you have to humiliate. It's not about to killing or torture. It's to humiliate. So the oppressed feel degraded. And both the oppressed understand and the oppressors understand. It's constant.

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.

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.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

Old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored—it is a shadow over all of us.