Racial Guilt Quotes

In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.

When is black America going to forgive white America for slavery?

White people are so fragile, God bless 'em. 'Well, I didn't own slaves.' No you didn't. Nobody is asking you to take personal responsibility for this. But you're a beneficiary of a system that did. Just own that and move on.

I'm not black, but there's a whole lot of times I wish I could say I'm not white.

No one who's white thinks he's innocent. No one who's black thinks he's guilty.

...on every sin which a colored man commits, the just white man must make a considerable discount, because of the colored man's antecedents. The heirs of slavery cannot with any sort of justice, be required to be as clear and straight and upright as the heirs of ancient freedom. And besides, whenever a colored man commits an unright action, upon his head is the guilt of only about one tenth of it, and upon your heads and mine and the rest of the white race lies fairly and justly the other nine tenths of the guilt.

So white guilt is not a guilt of conscience; it's not something that you get up in the morning and say, my God, I feel guilty about what happened to black Americans. Rather it is the fact that in relation to black Americans you lack moral authority.

The white people who are guilty of white supremacy are trying to hide their own guilt by accusing The Honorable Elijah Muhammad of teaching black supremacy when he tries to uplift the mentality, the social, mental and economic condition of the black people in America.

A heavy guilt rests upon us for what the whites of all nations have done to the colored peoples. When we do good to them, it is not benevolence--it is atonement.

I think there's a lot of shame in American race relations. There's a lot of suppressed guilt that lashes itself out still. I see that all the time, and whereas opposed to sort of trying to address the issue in an up-front way, they're attacking and thus perpetuating the problem thinking that they're being sophisticated and post-racial, when, in fact, they're being completely regressive.

The enormous success of 2009's 'The Blind Side,' in which Sandra Bullock makes a black teenager one of the family, demonstrates that America isn't post-racial. It is thoroughly mired in race - the myths that surround it, the guilt it inspires, the discomfort it causes, the struggle to transcend it.

As a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, I felt it was ridiculous to expect me to atone for the sins of slavery and segregation, to say nothing of the household drudgery and workplace discrimination suffered by women.

If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it's Caucasians.

Segregation, as even the segregationists know in their hearts, is morally wrong and sinful. If it weren't, the white South would not be haunted as it is by a deep sense of guilt for what it has done to the Negro - guilt for patronizing him, degrading him, brutalizing him, depersonalizing him, thingifying him; guilt for lying to itself. This is the source of the schizophrenia that the South will suffer until it goes through its crisis of conscience.

White America is tortured by black America's failure to thrive, and all that guilt and anxiety has only gotten worse as a substantial quota of white America loses its own footing in the middle class and plunges into the rough country of joblessness, hopelessness, and government dependency.

Well, the white race in America is the same way. As individuals it is impossible for them to escape the collective crime committed against the Negroes in this country, collectively.

The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.

Black racism is a myth created by whites to ease their guilt feelings. As long as whites can be assured that blacks are racists, they can find reasons to justify their own oppression of’ black people.

Many white people sense that they are being blamed for the sins of white slave owners and imperialists merely through some lineage of ethnicity. Activists' constant stress on white privilege can lead to an unhealthy defensive posture of white victimhood.

If you've been preached to, if you've been educated, if you've been raised to believe that America is the most racist, the most disgustingly vile nation in the history of the world, and you are white, then you can inoculate yourself. You can immunize yourself from being associated with that aspect of American history because you are white, by becoming anti-American, anti-this and anti-that.

Face your reality. You, black or white, are not innocent anymore. Either you have the courage to face it or you will go down together with the whole idea of the American Dream.