Racial Debt Quotes

In the NBA, as in nowhere else in America, white people are utterly beholden to black people, and they're not about to let us off that easily. It's a kind of very mild payback for the last 500 years.

We've got to stand up at some point and say, 'We are not gonna pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress.' That war's been fought. That was over a century ago. That debt was paid for in blood, and it was paid for in the blood of a lot of Yankees, especially. And there's no reparations for the blood that paid for the sin of slavery.

I don't think baseball owes colored people anything. I don't think colored people owe baseball anything, either.

A Christian people who have for two hundred years kept a race in bondage, deprived of the advantages of civilization and religion, owe them a debt of gratitude which it would seem ungenerous to withhold.

The United States will never be able to pay us [Blacks] all they owe us. They don't have the money.

The people of the North owe to the colored race a deep obligation that is no easy matter to fulfill.

“America begins in black plunder and white democracy.” I appreciate the day off today to finally fully read The Case for Reparations. . . . I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught. . . . Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt. Yes, reparations. Yes, on this day.

Black college-educated people got to where they are on the backs of domestic help, meaning their parents and grandparents. So people should not forget how they got to where they are.