Racial Difference Quotes

My parents told me from the time I can remember that, 'Yeah, you're adopted. But this is your family.' I can remember my mom, she tells me this story: when I was little, I was looking at her, and I was like, 'Why isn't my skin the same color as yours?' She was like, 'Oh, you're adopted, but I wish I had pretty brown skin like you.'

I think the O.J. Simpson trial was a revelation about the ongoing patterns of racial difference in American society.

The two ethnic groups that remain fundamentally different from the Han Chinese - in terms of history, culture, language, religion and physical appearance - are the Uighurs and Tibetans. In these two groups, the Han Chinese come face to face with difference.

In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.... And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently..

I'm a grandmother and like every grandmother, I worry about the safety and security of my grandchildren, but my worries are not the same as black grandmothers.

Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.

Modern technical civilization does not seem to be as well handled by the black man as by the white man in the United States

The great evil of American slavery was involuntary servitude or forced labor. I really believe that the true evil of American slavery was the narrative of racial difference that we created to justify it.

The unemployment rate is still twice as high for blacks as for whites.

You may set the Negro free, but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the European.

Look at my skin - I am not of the white people.

We have no concern with South America. We can have no well-founded political sympathy with them. We are sprung from different stock.

From about the age of 5, I was aware that I didn't fit. I was the black, atheist kid in the all-white, Catholic school run by nuns. I was an anomaly.

In general, Barack Hussein Obama brings us face to face with the discomfort our society feels with this idea of difference.

I thought, maybe the difference between white folks and colored is just this matter of reading and writing. I made up my mind I would know my letters.

You can't understand what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, you can't understand what happened to Eric Garner in New York City, without understanding this narrative of racial difference that was created during the slave years.

I think that it's hard enough being an adolescent and wanting so much to fit in with your peers, your schoolmates, and to erase any sign of difference, to be part of the group. And being biracial but also being black in a predominately white school marked me as different.

A poor white woman from the South is different than a poor black woman from the South, and has a completely different experience.

Because of my Asian-ness, I couldn't be anonymous - what I said, what I ate, what I did at the weekend were startlingly different to what everyone else did. I was also a performer, quick and chameleon-like, good at accents, so that made me stand out.

I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.

I got bullied so much growing up for being a different color in a majority white school.

By the time I was 5, I was already an outcast. It was the early 1960s, and I was part of the only Jewish family in a decidedly Christian suburb of Waltham, Mass.

I always felt different and it was because I was Middle Eastern. Where most people were very fair, light-skinned, and had blue eyes, I was hairy with dark hair and dark skin.

The issue, perhaps, boils down to one of how perceptions or misperceptions of racial difference impact various 'individuals', or groups of 'individuals', experience of freedom in America. Some would argue that it goes beyond hampering their "pursuit of happiness" to outright obliterating it.