Racial Stratification Quotes

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

Apartheid was baked hard in the mining industry because that's where it originated.

Racial discourses and theories are socially constructed ... but repudiating race theory does not make it disappear in politics. Race matters ... because it functions as a marker and an anchor to establish and repudiate identity, status and position ... Races exist because racism exists.

The modern conception of 'race' owes its widespread diffusion to the white man. Wherever he has gone, he has carried it with him. ... This is not to say that discrimination against (personal) groups on the basis of skin color or difference did not exist in the ancient world; there is plenty of evidence that it did. But it is to say that such views never became the officially established doctrine, upon any large scale, of any ancient society. ...

There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us ... Even when you cease to be slaves, you are far removed from being placed on an equality with the white man ... I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact

Race is such a contentious issue because of the painful history of racism. Race didn't create racism, but racism created race.

I thought the Navy at times resembled a Southern plantation that had somehow escaped the Civil War. Blacks swabbed the decks, shined shoes, did the cooking, washed the dishes, and served the food. Virtually no other jobs were open to them.

The tobacco markets I worked in were segregated. If you went to the bathroom, there was 'White,' there was 'Colored,' and there was 'Other.' I grew up in that.

I've experienced colorism in that way: where if you're lighter, then you'll potentially be accepted into society better than if you were darker-skinned.

Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.

I do believe that something akin to a racial caste system is alive and well in America.

Your white uniform as a black domestic was your ticket anywhere in town.

To deny the predictive validity of race at this level is nonscientific and unrealistic.

Blackness has always been stigmatised, even amongst black people who flee from the density of that blackness. Some black people recoil from black people who are that dark because it has always been stigmatised.

I think we've become blind in this country to the ways in which we've managed to reinvent a caste-like system here in the United States, one that functions in a manner that is as oppressive, in many respects, as the one that existed in South Africa under apartheid and that existed under Jim Crow here in the United States.

When I was young, I went to a church where the lighter-skinned you were, the closer you sat to the altar.

The apartheid people were actors, and they had to act out their part in their beliefs every day. That's why we always saw them as being comedic.

Apartheid is often misunderstood. It could just as easily be understood a policy of good neighborliness.

What I know now is that I used to not just tolerate but submit to and even on some deep level need our society's web of problems called race, its received and dangerous habits of thinking about and organizing people along a binary of white and black, free and unfree, even once I suspected them to be irredeemably flawed.

What I believe about race is that race is not real. It's not a biological reality. It's a hierarchical system that was created to leverage power and privilege between different groups of people.

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.

Americans have their issues with skin colour, even within the black community, with light and dark skin; it's crazy - but no one's oblivious to it.