Are black people conscious of how excruciatingly self-conscious white people have become in their every interaction with black people? Is this self-consciousness an improvement? Maybe not, because I'm thinking of people in categories rather than as people, which is a famously dangerous thing to do.
I've turned the annoying questions that white people ask into a career, so I understand that's where I live.
That's just how white folks will do you. It wasn't merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn't know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserved of their scorn.
I've seen and always been extremely aware of racism... casual racism, serious racism... all of that.
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
My first college roommate greeted me with a shocked silence followed by, 'So... you're black.'
I get offended when people say, 'So, being a white rapper...and growing up white...after being born white...' It's all I ever hear!
Racism is like high blood pressure—the person who has it doesn’t know he has it until he drops over with a God damned stroke. There are no symptoms of racism. The victim of racism is in a much better position to tell you whether or not you’re a racist than you are.
There's a difference between racism and "I don't know any better. I'm clueless." Racism is like, "I'm trying to make you feel bad." That's racism.
I'm this generic, ambiguous scapegoat for white people to call me a race traitor and take out their hostility on. And I'm a target for anger and pain about white people from the black community. It's like I am the worst of all these worlds.
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.'
I think the 'sunken place' - that term is what I hear when I'm just casually living my life. People say it around me. Not because they're around me; they're saying it because it articulated a state of mind. Lil Wayne's rapped about it.
White fragility doesn't always manifest in overt ways; silence and withdrawal are also functions of fragility.
Stop saying you're not racist because you have a friend that's black. That's like saying you're not a pedophile because you have a friend that's a kid.
You can get racially abused 10 times before you even reach the football stadium. If you've been confronted every day with something like that, it's hard. This is not about people playing the 'race card.' This is a reality that people like to sweep under the carpet.
The more afraid we are of the shadow of racism, the more conscious we might become of our own unsuspected biases.
There are people out there like Fox News who, every time a Black person complains in public of how we are treated in our society, is accused of “playing the race card.”
As a person of color, you're in a PhD level racism class, every day. Every day, I'm in a deep racism seminar. And I'm not saying that white people aren't taking that class, but they don't show up that often and they're auditing it.
White people are very wily when it comes to race. We will do everything that we can to get out from under the idea of race.
My father identified as a black man. No one asked him because he was clearly black. But people always ask me. If we were together, people would look at us in a really strange way. It sucked. As a little girl I had blond hair and they'd look at me, look at him, and be disgusted.
I remember when I was a kid being called names, including the 'n' word. The first time that happened, it really bothered me. But most of the people I dealt with were all white. Most of my close friends were white.
I asked him if he ever hung out with black guys in high school and he said, 'Well, no. They always had these angry looks on their faces. Who wouldn't look ticked off having to deal with nitwits like him?
Santa Claus was white and everything bad was black. The little ugly duckling was the black duck, and the black cat was the bad luck. And if I threaten you, I'm going to blackmail you.I said, 'Momma, why don't they call it 'whitemail'? They lie too.'
As black folks we're always sensitive. As a black person it's always racial.
I think everyone is "racist," to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at, but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.
