Racial Marginalization Quotes

Not one black man is prominent in Brazil. The Negroes there are still at the bottom.

I'm dark-skinned. When I'm around black people, I'm made to feel 'other' because I'm dark-skinned. I've had to wrestle with that, with people going, 'You're too black.' Then I come to America, and they say, 'You're not black enough.'

Obama reminds me of the black kid at a white school that don't nobody want to play with.

Labels applied to people of any race are inherently offensive.

Blacks—across the economic and ideological spectrum—often feel astonishingly vulnerable, of accusations of disloyalty to race.

My first reaction to Trump being elected was a visceral one. I cried for black people in general but, more particularly, for those of us at the margins who have been struggling and who have never received enough support.

Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.

When I was growing up, Asians were so few and far between as to be almost invisible. And so the idea of an Asian American movement or an Asian American thrust in this country was unthinkable.

I have to show off my struggle so that people accept that I'm black. No matter that every single room I go to, I'm usually the darkest person there... I kind of resent that mentality. I'm just an individual.

I never identified with anybody. I have always been very sensitive about my color, because everybody called me 'yellow gal.' I was caught in between both sides - nobody wanted me. I love that my audience is there, but I always feel as though I have to fend for myself.

I was born outraged. I was born without, knowing my people were not counted, not included, not centered. I struggled through low-resourced schools, communities, and housing projects.

Black people have been marginalized and kept away from the economics of this country. I think people are starting to understand that and are trying to figure out how we can change that and allow everybody to join in this game of capitalism.

It is pleasing to reflect that results so beneficial, not only to the States immediately concerned, but to the harmony of the Union, will have been accomplished by measures equally advantageous to the Indians. What the native savages become when surrounded by a dense population and by mixing with the whites may be seen in the miserable remnants of a few Eastern tribes, deprived of political and civil rights, forbidden to make contracts, and subjected to guardians, dragging out a wretched existence, without excitement, without hope, and almost without thought.

Generally speaking, we as black people have been celebrated more for when we are subservient when we are not being leaders or kings or in the center of our own narrative driving it forward.

I'm not a token black guy.

Growing up, I was confused about my identity: I felt like I wasn't black enough to be black, but not white enough to be white.

The prison industrial system, things like that are cleverly put in place to attempt to marginalize a certain group of people - and it's not only black, it's replete across the American society.

My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself outside of it. My mother, on the other hand, not only accepted that she would always be an outsider in this country but also believed it to be a finer fate and home than any other she could have had.

New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.

Black people are not often considered mainstream.

The white man will keep on granting tokenism; a few big Negroes will get big jobs, but the black masses will catch hell as long as they stay in the white man's house.

Young black men in America have an identity ascribed to them that is a direct legacy of slavery.

The history of blackness is also a history of erasure.

Symbolic racism is hurtful and it is especially hurtful to Black children who get called Black Pete in school and grow up with the sense that they are inferior to white kids.

How do you keep the black female body present, and how do you own value for something that society won't give value to? It's a question I try to answer through my own life.