Color Prejudice Quotes

The accident of the predominance of white men in modern times should not give us supercilious ideas about color or persuade us to listen to superficial theories about the innate superiority of the white-skinned man. Four thousand years ago, when civilization was already one or two thousand years old, white men were just a bunch of semi-savages on the outskirts of the civilized world. If there had been anthropologists in Crete, Egypt, and Babylonia, they would have pronounced the white race obviously inferior, and might have discoursed learnedly on the superior germ-plasm or glands of colored folk.

In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington.

Being a woman of color, I can truthfully state that I don't feel safe around those who are sworn to honor and uphold the law.

The whites have always had the say in America. White people made Jesus white, angels white, the Last Supper white. If I threaten you, I'm blackmailing you. A black cat is bad luck. If you're put out of a club, you're blackballed. Angel's-food cake is white; devil's-food cake is black. Good guys in cowboy movies wear white hats. The bad guys always wore black hats.

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.

I don't even know where to start in terms of people having such an issue about color, especially being dark. I just think on different levels it's ignorance; it's no belief, no confidence, it's insecurity, so you want to inflict it on somebody else.

I cannot escape the conscientious discharge of my duty towards a class of American citizens, whose only crime consists of their color.

I suggest that what has happened to the white Southerner is in some ways much worse than what has happened to the Negroes there ... One has to assume that he is a man like me, but he does not know what drives him to use the club, to menace with a gun, and to use a cattle prod against a woman's breasts ... Their moral lives have been destroyed by a plague called color.

In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being.

Government service in all its branches, state and federal, would have to be thrown open to all on the basis solely of merit, and promotions made accordingly. It would probably be necessary to have drastic laws against manifestations of color prejudice and discrimination, just as we have legislated against kidnapping, arson and murder which are certainly no more serious from the viewpoint of national welfare.

For the first time, I wasn't embarrassed by the look of beauty, of elegance, because when you see someone who has only one rag as their property, but it happens to be beautiful and pink and silk, beauty doesn't have to be separated... I have always said that you shouldn't have biases, you shouldn't have prejudices. But before that [before his trip to India, circa 1975] I'd never been able to use purple, because it was too beautiful.

All men were blessed with equal right and privilege and that liberty was the birth right, the Palladium of every individual…. Of all the specious reasons for importing and holding in bondage the native African, none was more absurd than the idea that one who was formed with a dark complexion is inferior to him, who possesses a complexion more light. Should a thing like this be admitted as general mankind would be at once resolved into an unusual monarchy with some weak puny white-faced creature for the sovereign, and those whose color was furtherest removed from white, though a Newton or...a Washington would be reduced to the most abject slavery…. Such claims could never be admitted by any except those who are prompted by avarice to encroach upon the sacred rights of their fellow men, and are vainly endeavoring to appease a corroding conscience.

Please do not think me terribly narrow, but Sinha is comparatively white, whilst Muckerji is black as my hat!

Political division, based on color, is entirely artificial; and when it disappears, so will the domination of one color group by another.

Purple has always been my favorite color... but purple, when I was a little kid, was a color that boys weren't really allowed to wear. That's what all the kids at school told me. I filled my wardrobe with as much purple as I could possibly find, because who cares? Life's too short to dress by other people's rules.

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box.

The lighter the skin, the more acceptable you are. The darker the skin, the more marginalised you become. I want to demonstrate that you can produce beauty in the context of a figure that has that kind of velvety blackness. It can be done.

Far too often, I have been accepted or rejected for work because of the color of my skin.

The history of slavery in this country has affected not only how black people see themselves, but how white people see black people as well, and the roles they're meant to play... I'm aware of it, as a person of color.