Best 104 Anti-Racism Quotes to Help You Fight Color Discrimination
Facing racism today seems incomprehensible since at this day and age humanity should have already overcome such disgraceful beliefs and manners. No particular race, skin color, custom or religion is superior or inferior to another. Unfortunately, it takes many forms and can occur in many places. It includes prejudice, discrimination or hatred. This kind of abuse or harassment shouldn’t even exist.
To stand together, we must stand up for one another and recognize the fear, hurt and outrage rightly provoked. People shouldn’t fear within their own communities yet alone fear in their own skin.
People from all walks of life must be free, and this will enable us as a whole to continue to empower people to change the world for the better. Great societies have always drawn strength from diversity and welcome everyone. We must all free ourselves from such beliefs and let life, love and respect overflow. To create change we must reexamine our own views and actions to fight against racism.
Here there are numerous quotes to help inspire and keep you vigilant to the elimination of racism. These quotes come from personalities who struggled and fought with all their will and even gave their lives for a hate free world today.
Table of Contents
- Racism Quotes
- Famous Quotes About Racism
- Anti-Racism Quotes
- Martin Luther King Quotes About Racism
- “To Kill A Mockingbird” Racism Quotes
- Insightful Racism Quotes
- Long Quotes About Racism
Racism Quotes
- We have been basically persuaded that we should not talk about racism. Angela Davis
- Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
- You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.
- No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
- Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
- Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.
- A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything. Malcolm X
- If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. Malcolm X
- We live in a nation of pigs and murderers.
- If you judge people you have no time to love them. Mother Teresa
- Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.
- As long as you hate, there will be people to hate. George Harrison
- Revolution is not a one-time event. Audre Lorde
- We learn to be racist, therefore we can learn not to be racist. Racism is not genetical. It has everything to do with power. Jane Elliot
- If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.
- There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race — scientifically, anthropologically. Toni Morrison
- Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.
- In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
- Action is the only remedy to indifference: the most insidious danger of all. Elie Wiesel
- Laughter has no foreign accent. Paul Lowney
- Equal rights for others does not mean less rights for you. It’s not pie. Unknown
- No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger than its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise. Marian Anderson
- The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery.
- An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Mahatma Gandhi
- Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization. Mahatma Gandhi
- Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public. Cornel West
- Sexual, racial, gender violence and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture. Charlotte Bunch
- No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
- It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences. Audre Lorde
- To cheapen the lives of any group of men, cheapens the lives of all men, even our own. This is a law of human psychology, or human nature. And it will not be repealed by our wishes, nor will it be merciful to our blindness.
- We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.
- Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible. Maya Angelou
- I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.
- How can you compromise with people who don’t want you to exist? They want us to disappear. I can’t adapt to death.
- If you want to address racial disparity in the juvenile justice system, everybody has to have a role in it. Everybody has some responsibility. James Bell
Famous Quotes About Racism
- I am going to stop calling you a white man and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. Morgan Freeman
- Whoever debases others is debasing himself.
- Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling. Miguel de Unamuno
- Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends. Maya Angelou
- Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.
- The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
- A man can be honest in any sort of skin.
- Slavery is indeed gone, but its shadow still lingers over the country and poisons more or less the moral atmosphere of all sections of the republic.
- I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse. Mark Twain
- Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.
- Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make. Ruth Fulton Benedict
- As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’
- I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone. The Sound and the Fury
- To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow. William Faulkner
- Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.
- Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another. Beloved
- Race and racism is a reality that so many of us grow up learning to just deal with. But if we ever hope to move past it, it can’t just be on people of color to deal with it. It’s up to all of us — Black, white, everyone — no matter how well-meaning we think we might be, to do the honest, uncomfortable work of rooting it out. Michelle Obama
- All nationalistic distinctions – all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect – are entirely spurious.
- If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together…
Anti-Racism Quotes
- If our principles are right, why should we be cowards?
- Achievement has no color.
- The function of freedom is to free someone else.
- The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.
- If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
- The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be an anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it’s the only way forward. Ijeoma Oluo
- I believe that all men, black, brown, and white, are brothers.
- It is not enough to be quietly non-racist, now is the time to be vocally anti-racist. Unknown
- The highest result of education is tolerance.
- It’s an universal law– intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
- Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. James Baldwin
- We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism. Rigoberta Menchú
- I believe all Americans who believe in freedom, tolerance and human rights have a responsibility to oppose bigotry and prejudice. Coretta Scott King
- It is never too late to give up our prejudices. Henry David Thoreau
- It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate. James Baldwin
- Freedom is never given; it is won. A. Philip Randolph
- It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you’re doing something.
- The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
- …jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.
- Black lives matter is not a black people’s movement – metoo is not a women’s movement – pride is not a gay people’s movement – it’s all humanity’s movement – a movement for being accepted as humans by the humans.
- We must open the doors and we must see to it they remain open, so that others can pass through. Rosemary Brown
- Racism is cruel and unjust. It cuts deep and lingers long in individual and community memories. And it is not a thing of the past….We all have a duty to do what we can to turn this around. William Deane
Martin Luther King Quotes About Racism
- A right delayed is a right denied.
- Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. .
- Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
- I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word. Martin Luther King Jr.
- I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.
- Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.
- Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
- Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.
- Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.
- We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
- Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. .
Best 50 MLK Quotes for Martin Luther King Jr. Day
“To Kill A Mockingbird” Racism Quotes
- I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks. To Kill a Mockingbird
- Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts. To Kill a Mockingbird
- As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash. To Kill a Mockingbird
- Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women – black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men. To Kill a Mockingbird
- The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience. To Kill a Mockingbird
- People in their right minds never take pride in their talents. To Kill a Mockingbird
- Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results. To Kill a Mockingbird
- It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived. To Kill a Mockingbird
- –Atticus, he was real nice.
-Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.
To Kill a Mockingbird - Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill A Mockingbird: 50 Unforgettable Quotes on Human Morality
Insightful Racism Quotes
- Sexism and racism are parallel problems. You can compare them in some ways, but they’re not at all the same. But they’re both symptoms inside the white male power structure. Frida Kahlo
- Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
- When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.
- I distinctly remember a debate about whether racism was simply discrimination, or discrimination plus power. Thinking about power made me realize that racism was about so much more than personal prejudice. It was about being in the position to negatively affect other people’s life chances.
- People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you’re dead, when they’ve killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn’t have any character. James Baldwin
- The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
- Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill…For the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.
- For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.
- The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance. - I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust…We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.
- Despite the important of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.
Long Quotes About Racism
- There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.
- We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization – black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love…. What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
- Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.
- It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.
- The trouble around difference is really about privilege & power-the existence of privilege & the lopsided distribution of power that keeps it going. The trouble is rooted in a legacy that we all inherited, and WHILE WE’RE HERE IT BELONGS TO US. It isn’t our fault. It wasn’t caused by something we did or didn’t do. But now that it’s ours, it’s up to us to decide how we’re going to deal with it before we collectively pass it along to the generations that will follow ours. Allen G. Johnson
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