Racial Relations Quotes

“In 7.81 square miles of vaunted black community, the 850 square feet of Dum Dum Donuts was the only place in the "community" where one could experience the Latin root of the word, where a citizen could revel in common togetherness. So one rainy Sunday afternoon, not long after the tanks and media attention had left, my father ordered his usual. He sat at the table nearest the ATM and said aloud, to no one in particular, "Do you know that the average household net worth for whites is $113,149 per year, Hispanics $6,325, and black folks $5,677?"

"For real?"

"What's your source material, nigger?"

"The Pew Research Center."

Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center, and hearing this, the concerned patrons turned around in their squeaky plastic seats as best they could, given that donut shop swivel chairs swivel only six degrees in either direction. Pops politely asked the manager to dim the lights. I switched on the overhead projector, slid a transparency over the glass, and together we craned our necks toward the ceiling, where a bar graph titled "Income Disparity as Determined by Race" hovered overhead like some dark, damning, statistical cumulonimbus cloud threatening to rain on our collective parades.

"I was wondering what that li'l nigger was doing in a donut shop with a damn overhead projector.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“The people at the front are young, energetic, and incredibly brave. There’s a Black girl, in her twenties, skinny as a rail, with a black kerchief over her face. The kerchief is useful in both pandemics and the fog of tear gas. She wears skinny jeans and a black T-shirt with “Black Lives Matter” on it. Some white adults are as offended by her choice of wardrobe as she is by their overall indifference. She’s opposed by much larger men, outfitted like extras in Mad Max or RoboCop. The only thing threatening about her is her mouth and her willpower.

...This girl is intelligent and talented, someone who should be leading this country into the twenty-first century. Instead, she’s out in the street risking her life because she dares to be dissatisfied.”
― Gary J Floyd

“She waved me to a plaid couch in the middle of the living room floor. I eased down and looked around the sorry place. The odor of stale turnip greens was so thick, it seemed like it was seeping through the walls. Every piece of furniture looked like it belonged in the city dump, especially a chair with no legs facing the couch...If Betty Jean hadn't been so cheerful, I would have felt sorry for her.”
― Mary Monroe, Red Light Wives

“The history of the 20th century, especially the second half, has been the history of racial minorities organizing and acting in their own racial interests, with great success. As of 2022, about 76% of Americans were white, but as of that same year, only 41% of Ivy League students were white; this disparity is mainly driven by diversity quotas, which mandate that minority students with lower aptitude and SAT scores be accepted over white students with higher scores. The traditional way of fixing the problem would be for white people to organize in their own interest, but doing so is absolutely forbidden. [...] If this were aimed at any other racial group, it would be in violation of article 19 of the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It’s “ethnocentrism for me, diversity for thee.”
― Mike Maxwell, The Cultured Thug Handbook: A Guide to Radical Right-Wing Thought