Racism In The West Quotes

“Someone can tell you all your life that you’re inferior, but it doesn’t matter until you accept it and allow for validation. Once validation takes place, it’s then that the colonial malaise sets in like smallpox.”
― M.B. Wilmot

“If anyone thinks interracial "anything" is a big deal, they're probably inbred.”
― M.B. Wilmot

“Are Latino-Americans white? Black? Other? Illegal aliens from Mars? Or are we the very face of America?”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“If origin defines race, then the entire human race is African.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“If you can't see past my name, you can't see me.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“Racial hatred in America still exists but never was it anything like the time immediately after the Civil War. The western history of our nation would not be complete without the story of former slaves that helped develop the unique character of the West.”
― William Silverman

“While stationed in Fort Jackson, I experienced racial prejudice for the first time and came to the understanding that humans are not born with prejudice, but learn prejudice. Back home in South Dakota, I only knew one black American. The Scandinavians in my community treated him just like any other Swede; my family considered him a friend. My parents taught me, and I believed that all men are equal because God created all men in His image.

One day during a week end furlough, I boarded a crowded city bus. As I walked down the aisle, I looked for an open seat. Looking towards the rear of the bus, I noticed three huge, young black men sitting on a bench in the back. I decided to squeeze onto the bench with them. As I sat down, a woman said in a very loud voice, "What is that white soldier doing in our part of the bus?"

Neither my life experiences nor my education prepared me for what I experienced walking the streets of Fort Jackson. I saw water fountains for whites only, barbershops for blacks only, and separation for most aspects of Southern living. I discovered that the feelings of prejudice ran deeply amongst many of the people that we encountered. In fact, the blacks even trained separately from the whites during our military preparation, even though we all worked towards defending the United States of America.”
― Omanson, Oliver, Prisoner of War Number 21860: The World War II Memoirs of Oliver Omanson

“The abolition of slavery, apart from preservation of the Union, was the most important result of our Civil War. But the transition was badly handled. Slaves were simply declared free and then left to their own devises. Southern Negroes, powerless, continued to be underprivileged in education, medical care, job opportunities and political status.”
― William Silverman

“I jus luvs me some lily white turkey
meats".

~R. Alan Woods [2012]”
― R. Alan Woods

“In addition, the distortion of actual crime statistics vs. media coverage, shows that news outlets portray black Americans being depicted as suspects or criminals at a rate that exceeds actual arrest statistics for those same crimes by a whopping 24 percentage points- a disparity which reveals a horrific implicit bias in reporting.”
― Alice Minium

“Amma was shorter, with African hips and thighs
perfect slave girl material one director told her when she walked into an audition for a play about Emancipation
whereupon she walked right back out again

in turn a casting director told Dominique she was wasting his time when she turned up for a Victorian drama when there weren’t any black people in Britain then
she said there were, called him ignorant before also leaving the room
and in her case, slamming the door”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

“Racists, then, are indoctrinated citizens who think they are entitled and superior to all others, and therefore capable of committing racism and violence against them. I contend that indoctrinated individuals are prisoners to the walls built around them that keep them indoctrinated. Therefore, instead of seeing them as ‘enemies’, we need to apply the same methods of reform some thinkers have suggested to the prison system in that rather than being purely punitive, prisons should aspire to rehabilitate prisoners in such ways that they may return to society with better attitude, understanding, and healthier minds and bodies (all things lacking in racist people, if you think about it deeply). Even more important is to build a society in such a way that there would be little need to have prison systems in the first place.”
― Louis Yako

“If racism is the product of historical and socio-economic conditions, to the extent that these conditions can be changed, racism can eventually be abolished.”
― Rebecca Ruth Gould, Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom

“As a journalist, in blindly, parroting these police reports, I am also leaving out a significant amount of social context- the context, and begging question all social institutions ought to consider, of whether it is actually advantageous to anyone to persecute nonviolent offenders with a medieval vigilance that feeds the very problems it hopes to fight, and to waste both police resources and valuable news time lending importance to something that is so obviously only “News” in the way that it highlights a particularly ugly facet of our criminal justice system, and by doing so, we lend it a power which is ethically not its due.”
― Alice Minium

“This style of reporting parrots and gives greater legitimacy to the frankly disturbing level of vigilance police seem to exercise in their war on poor nonviolent offenders, a vigilance which all too clearly paints a scantly unflattering portrait of the priorities of police, and the prevalence of white supremacist attitudes across all institutional levels.”
― Alice Minium

“I don’t think anyone deserves to rot in jail the rest of their lives for stealing a pack of cigarettes. The court systems will be no kinder to these people than police have been, and both are avid practitioners of a convenient morality that consigns millions of black Americans to poverty with its selective policies, then persecutes those same black Americans at a disproportionate rate (almost a rate of 1:5) for the same (often nonviolent) crimes, openly regards black Americans with brutality (often killing people in cold blood for no reason other than that they ‘look like’ the grainy photos of 'suspects' I report), and then condemns millions of black Americans, each year, to lives in prison- too often for nothing more than the crime of stealing a pack of cigarettes.”
― Alice Minium

“Popular media uses the depersonalized ‘Unidentified Black Suspect’ as little more than a plot device in its parable of implicit racism- while ignoring the fact that these are people, not plot devices, and that black lives are not ours to own, and the story of black culture is not one white people get to define and rewrite according to what generates clicks and viewership.”
― Alice Minium

“I learned that people will practice racism and hate simply because they can or because they know that they can get away with it. They will think twice about it if there are serious legal protections that impose serious consequences on them for doing so. Apparently, for some reason, our system of governance insists on denying this protection for people of color and other marginalized folks, while we know it has been successful in granting it for other minorities who used to be discriminated against in America in the past. We need to ask why and how we can change this.”
― Louis Yako

“Keeping our focus on racist individuals is not only futile, but it also spends a precious energy that we need to direct at changing the entire structure and the system in place as we have it. We must understand that the system and the structure we have in place are created by the powerful 1% that clearly benefits from racism as a form of governance.”
― Louis Yako

“Yes, make no mistake, racism (like sexism, patriotism, and ethnonationalism) is a form of governance in that it consistently prevents change and maintains the status quo by deflecting attention from the core issues; by pitting people against each other. In doing so, it blinds most people from seeing who the real enemy is. Racism as a form of governance makes people waste all their energy in the wrong places as well as channel all the hatred and bitterness against the wrong populations (Blacks, immigrants, foreigners, and so on).”
― Louis Yako