Ruby Dee Quotes

I suspect unconscious bias has been far more of a factor for President Obama than overt racism and will also be a challenge for Hillary Rodham Clinton if she runs for president again.

As a black woman, I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful; the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change.

When the systems we expect to help us actually hurt us, we have tragedy.

When I finished the juniors I felt, perhaps for about a year and a half, that everything was going to be the same and that I would be able to go out there and win any match. But it wasn't the case. I struggled.

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

Tonight the Negro knows from his radio and television that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson [Mississippi] he cannot even drive a garbage truck.

… the most ordinary Negro is a distinct gentleman, but it takes extraordinary training and opportunity to make the average white man anything but a hog.

As a woman of color, we're raised to know we have to be twice as good.

After two years at UCLA, I decided to leave. I was convinced that no amount of education would help a black man get a job.

A white man of authority don't ever want to admit to someone of colour they was wrong.

I shouldn't have to be preparing my children that the world is going to be unfair to them for the rest of their lives.

You try not to pay too much attention to the hype before the game, because you never know what's going to happen.

The journey of making 'Hidden Figures' has shown me the automatic privilege that all white men are afforded in America in 2017 and in any and every year before that.

The consequences for failure are very different if you're a woman or a person of color than they are if you're a guy. If you're a guy who makes a mistake, you get a second chance. Often, for those of us who are outsiders, we make a mistake, and that's the end of the conversation.

A guy can try something and not be successful, and it's just about him. But when you're a person of color, when you're a woman, when you're a woman of color in particular, you mess it up, and other people get tarred by your decision-making. You never act alone.

Racism is like high blood pressure—the person who has it doesn’t know he has it until he drops over with a God damned stroke. There are no symptoms of racism. The victim of racism is in a much better position to tell you whether or not you’re a racist than you are.

I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself, and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of race.

Things like racism are institutionalized. You might not know any bigots. You feel like "well I don't hate black people so I'm not a racist," but you benefit from racism. Just by the merit, the color of your skin. The opportunities that you have, you're privileged in ways that you might not even realize because you haven't been deprived of certain things. We need to talk about these things in order for them to change.

[A] pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.

Everyone tried with me. And everytime, it felt like the whole point of life was to see if trying was ever enough.

I stood up. It was all too much. I could not even meet my own expectations, and to be asked to deal with all theirs too was suffocating.

I think I'm what they call a never-was.

Racism does not diminish with brains, it's a disease, a sickness, it may incubate in ignorance but it doesn't necessarily disappear with the gaining of wisdom!

I don't wanna believe that racism exists, but the more I wish it away, the more I realize it's in our system.

America's racist, so what do you expect.