Denis Kearney Quotes

My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.

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

If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.

You are exacerbating inequality rather than opening up opportunity.

Resentment — that feeling when the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

Saying women aren't funny is now like saying Asians can't drive or saying black people have bad credit. It's just really, like, so obsolete.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

Oh, the ignorance of us upon whom Providence did not sufficiently smile to permit us to be born in New England.

I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.

My family's support and the negative environment of the day toward blacks in South Carolina became the forces that led me out of the South - first to New York, then to Philadelphia, where I found opportunity in the form of a PAL gym and my trainer, Yank Durham.

From exam grading to health education to professional training to democratic participation, paths towards self-realization and success in the world are often daunting and obscure: journeys only the privileged feel confident setting off along.

This is a contest between the white man’s hope and black evil.

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War II for no really good reason by our most liberal President. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slavelike inequalities.

Colored people are quite ignorant, mostly uneducated and I doubt that they would seek an education if they had an opportunity.

Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation.

I found everywhere now the most direct antagonism between the two classes. The whites charge generally that the negro is idle, and at the bottom of all local disturbances, and credit him with most of the vices and very few of the virtues of humanity. The negroes charge that the whites are revengeful, and intend to cheat the laboring class at every opportunity, and credit them with neither good purposes nor kindly hearts..

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.

… 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.

It’s a sordid business this divvying us up by race.

If I have to jump six feet to get the same thing that you have to jump two feet for - that's how racism works.

Injustice is either very blatant - you walk down the street and someone calls you a name; you don't get a job because of your gender or your skin color or your sexual preference - but injustice is also very subliminal.

We live in a world where racism hasn't changed at all. It's that old thing of, you know, the more things change, the more things remain the same.