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Category: race-relations
Quotes of Category: race-relations
TOP TAGS :book-loversdescentpatrickmermaidsdiasporadictatorshiplawmakerssecond-wind

  1. Zadie Smith _ White Teeth

    This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white {her mother liked the name} and Sharon is Pakistani {her mother thought it best - less trouble}.
    book-quoteimmigrationimmigrantsrace

  2. Alan Brennert _ Honolulu

    Hawai'i has often been called a melting pot, but I think of it more as a 'mixed plate'---a scoop of rice with gravy, a scoop of macaroni salad, a piece of mahi-mahi, and a side of kimchi. Many different tastes share the plate, but none of them lose their individual flavor, and together they make up a uniquely 'local' cuisine. This is also, I believe, what America is at its best---a whole greater than the sum of it's parts.
    book-quoterace-relationshawaiihonolulu

  3. Timothy B. Tyson _ Blood Done Sign My Name: A

    Anyone intent on moral clarity might want to find another book and, in fact, might not want to go anywhere near the enduring chasm of race in the United States.
    book-quoteunited-statesrace-relationsmoral-clarity

  4. Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me

    We were laughing but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge… The law did not protect us and now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say for furthering the assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world.
    book-quoterace-relationsracism-in-america

  5. Tom Robbins _ Jitterbug Perfume

    White folks have controlled New Orleans with money and guns, black folks have controlled it with magic and music, and although there has been a steady undercurrent of mutual admiration, an intermingling of cultures unheard of in any other American city, South or North; although there has prevailed a most joyous and fascinating interface, black anger and white fear has persisted, providing the ongoing, ostensibly integrated fete champetre with volatile and sometimes violent idiosyncrasies.
    book-quotegunsfearpower

  6. Joseph Conrad _ The Nigger of the Narcissus

    He seemed to hasten the retreat of departing light by his very presence; the setting sun dipped sharply, as though fleeing before our nigger; a black mist emanated from him; a subtle and dismal influence; a something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil. The circle broke up. The joy of laughter died on stiffened lips.
    book-quoteracismrace-relations

  7. Alice Walker _ Horses Make a Landscape Look

    We do not admire their president.We know why the White House is white.We do not find their children irresistible;We do not agree they should inherit the earth.
    book-quoteunited-states-of-americapoetryusa

  8. Toni Morrison _ Beloved

    Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed," she said, "and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.
    book-quoteracismluckrace-relations

  9. Paul Beatty _ The White Boy Shuffle

    Our teacher says we're supposed to be colorblind. That's hard to do if you can see color, isn't it?""Yeah, I'd say so, but I think your teacher means don't make any assumptions based on color.""Cross on the green and not in between.
    book-quoteracismracerace-relations

  10. Paul Beatty _ The Sellout

    The bus here because they lost Rosa Parks's bus.""Who lost Rosa Parks's bus?""White people. Who the fuck else? Supposedly, every February when schoolkids visit the Rosa Parks Museum, or wherever the fuck the bus is at, the bus they tell the kids is the birthplace of the civil rights movement is a phony. Just some old Birmingham city bus they found in some junkyard. That's what my sister says, anyway.""I don't know."Cuz took two deep swallows of gin. "What you mean, 'You don't know'? You think that after Rosa Parks bitch-slapped white America, some white rednecks going to go out of their way to save the original bus? That'd be like the Celtics hanging Magic Johnson's jersey in the rafters of the Boston Garden. No fucking way.
    book-quotemuseumsrace-relationsartifacts

  11. Paul Beatty _ The Sellout

    I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief."
    book-quoteguiltjusticeinnocence

  12. Roxane Gay _ Bad Feminist

    I no longer want to believe these problems are too complex for us to make sense of them.
    book-quoteracismrace-relations
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