Racial Legacy Quotes

That world is ended, as if it had never been. Let the race of Adam and Eve take warning.

[Whites] must reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites. The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.

Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact

When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people. May they pick me apart and take the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave the bitter bullshit rotten white parts alone.

I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves.

I think when people talk about race relations in America, they talk about African-American and white people. Asians are not often brought into the conversation. But there's a historical legacy of issues between them. It's hard to be like, 'What about us?' But we are a little underrepresented.

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.

Nobody wants to get over the legacy of slavery more than Black people do.

White-on-black shootings evoke America's history of racism and so carry an iconic payload of menace. Black-on-black shootings carry no such payload, although they are truly menacing to the black community. They evoke only despair.

There is - and always will be - the legacy of chattel slavery in this nation, an obsession with racial and gender differences, but I think that, at its best, this nation is capable of creating standards for itself and reaching towards those standards.

Coming up in America in the '80s and '90s, we were not too far removed from slavery. People forget that.

We need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation. The fact is, in too many parts of this country, a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country.

South Carolina is one of the most racist states in America. John C. Calhoun is the name of a building at our school and he was a slave owner. Clemson, the name Clemson itself, was like a guy who was a slave owner. South Carolina, their whole history is messed up.

The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second class citizen to a second class immortal.

The wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment.

You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I've never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations.

Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.

Effectively transcending and conquering the legacies of enchainment, impoverishment and racial denigration continue to elude us. Residual elements of the plantation-based past continue to shape our societies and determine their trajectories.

Why are black folks singing Amazing Grace which is a song about a white slaver's conversion?

I think a commission set up to examine slavery and the consequences of it, would probably be a very fruitful, important dialogue for the United States to be involved in.

So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.

How ridiculous! You're going to have the first black president apologize for slavery?

The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.

We have never owned, as a country, the damage done not only to people who were enslaved but to future generations in which they were treated. I think that has damaged the future of many African-American people. Some have risen above it quite nobly, but it has impacted generations, and we have to be able to own that as part of the past.

Here I am, a product of something really vicious, product of the Atlantic slave trade. And yet, I give nary a thought to some of the awful things happening right now in the world.