Quotes about Race and Racial Diversity
Most popular race quotes
Our young must be taught that racial peculiarities do exist, but that beneath the skin, beyond the differing features, and into the true heart of being, fundamentally, we are more alike, my friend, than we are unalike.
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.
Do not call for black power or green power. Call for brain power.
How could I explain a young Black boy to a grown man who had been born White?
I don't go for that hate talk. Negroes ain't got time to be hating anybody. We got to get together.
I, with millions of other Americans, have the same dream Martin Luther King Jr. had; when I wake up I wish some of the things I dreamt would be true. I wish that little Black and White boys and girls would hold hands without being shocked at their nearness to each other and say in a natural way, "We have overcome."
Malcolm X was America's Molotov cocktail, thrown upon the White hope that all Black Americans would follow the nonviolent tenets of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
We are not our brother's keeper; we are our brother and we are our sister. We must look past complexion and see community.
I am America. I am the part you won't recognise, but get used to me. Black, confident, cocky. My name, not yours. My religion, not yours. My goals, my own. Get used to me.
Accomplishments have no color.
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.
A minority group has "arrived" only when it has the right to produce some fools and scoundrels without the entire group paying for it.
The ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable.
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.
Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.
Everybody's colored or else you wouldn't be able to see them.
Every true man has pride of race, and under appropriate circumstances, when the rights of others, his equals before the law, are not to be affected, it is his privilege to express such pride and to take such action based upon it as to him seems proper. ... Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior, who have the best heart, the best brain.
After all, there is but one race—humanity.
Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, or distinctions of race.
The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist; because race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance.
There are no 'white' or 'colored' signs on the foxholes or graveyards of battle.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.
We have to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that it is talent and training, not color, that makes a ballet dancer.
Human law may know no distinction among men in respect of rights, but human practice may.
The colour of the skin is in no way connected with strength of the mind or intellectual powers.
It was asserted that we were "a ragged set, crying for liberty." I reply to it, the whites have so long and so loudly proclaimed the theme of equal rights and privileges, that our souls have caught the flame also, ragged as we are.
Black men, don't be ashamed to show your colors, and to own them.
The race-problem is a moral one. It is a question entirely of ideas. Its solution will come especially from the domain of principles. Like all the other great battles of humanity, it is to be fought out with the weapons of truth.
The inspiration of the race is the race.
A white woman. A white woman has only one handicap to overcome—that of sex. I have two—both sex and race.
No race can speak for another or give utterance to its striving goal.
Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
The individual man tires to escape the race. And as soon as he ceases to represent the race, he represents man.
It is not races but individuals that are noble and courageous or ignoble and craven or considerate or persistent or philosophical or reasonable. The race gets credit when the percentage of noble individuals is high.
The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.
In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.
The tears of the red, yellow, black, brown and white man are all the same.
Until justice is blind to colour, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the colour of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.
