Systemic Racism Quotes

“Nobody notices, only you've known,

you're not sick, not crazy,
not angry, not sad--

It's just this, you're injured.”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

“That's the hate they're giving us, baby, a system designed against us. That's Thug Life.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“Even today there still exists in the South--and in certain areas of the North--the license that our society allows to unjust officials who implement their authority in the name of justice to practice injustice against minorities. Where, in the days of slavery, social license and custom placed the unbridled power of the whip in the hands of overseers and masters, today--especially in the southern half of the nation--armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence and death and conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, maim or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner. If one doubts this conclusion, let him search the records and find how rarely in any southern state a police officer has been punished for abusing a Negro.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“Our world is suffering from metastatic cancer. Stage 4. Racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, intersecting with bigotry of all kinds, justifying all kinds of inequities by victim blaming; heightening exploitation and misplaced hate; spurring mass shootings, arms races, and demagogues who polarize nations, shutting down essential organs of democracy; and threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change. In the United States, the metastatic cancer has been spreading, contracting, and threatening to kill the American body as it nearly did before its birth, as it nearly did during its Civil War. But how many people stare inside the body of their nations' racial inequities, their neighborhoods' racial inequities, their occupations' racial inequities, their institutions' racial inequities, and flatly deny that their policies are racist? They flatly deny that racial inequity is a signpost of racist policy. They flatly deny the racist policy as they use racist ideas to justify the racial inequity. They flatly deny the cancer of racism as the cancer cells spread and literally threaten their own lives and the lives of the people and spaces and places they hold dear. The popular conception of denial--like the popular strategy of suasion--is suicidal.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“What had started it, the mess this week? A white cop shot an unarmed black boy three times and killed him. Good old American know-how on display: We do marvels, we do injustice, and our hands were always busy.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Standing on a street corner in Manhattan two days after Diallo's murder, having just come from a meeting of concerned citizens to plan an organized response, I was so filled with frustration and sorrow that I turned to the woman beside me waiting for the light to change and asked 'What do you think about the cops shooting that man forty-one-times?'

She looked startled, confused--could she not feel the palpable rage, pain, and fear that pulsed through the black veins of this city and other cities across the nation?

'I don't know. I have to wait until all the facts are in. I'm sure they had a reason,' she finally responded.

Perhaps she saw the disgust and disappointment on my face. Stepping off the curb as the light turned green, she added, 'I mean, he must have done something.”
― Jill Nelson, Police Brutality: An Anthology

“Harvard University has chosen to make it harder for Asian applicants to be accepted into the university because they outperform their peers. So yes, systemic racism is real . . . at America’s top university.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“The Seattle Times reported in 2018 that the median net worth of white Seattleites is $456,000. The median net worth of black Seattleites—and here you should probably beep-boop-boop that therapist again—is $23,000. White net worth in my city is twenty times that of black net worth. If you are one of those people who believes that racism is a thing of the past, never existed at all, or is defined simply as one person being mean to another person, you are claiming that white people genuinely earn—through ability alone, because anything else would be a systemic advantage—twenty times as much as black people. White people are twenty times as good at their jobs, twenty times as skilled, twenty times as deserving. If you believe that, you are racist. That is racism. (Congratulations! I don’t know if you’ve heard, but 2019 is a great time for you guys.)”
― Lindy West

“Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“White people must show up and be willing to step out of the safe shelter that whiteness and the lack of direct impact can afford them. . . . For white people, in addition to all the reasons described earlier, risking is a form of solidarity.”
― Roxy Manning, How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy

“PASSED THE DEFINITION OF HUMAN.
PASSED THE AUTHORIZATION TO EXIT.”
― Misba, The High Auction

“BLACK is Brave, Leaderly, Adventurous, Conscientious and KINGly.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood

“It ends with me, toxic masculinity ends with me, religious intolerance ends with me - superstition 'n conspiracy ends with me, prejudice and puritanism ends with me - jungle nationalism ends with me, animal fundamentalism ends with me - segregated spaces, both outside and inside, end with me.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology

“If violence or harm occurs as the result of someone’s attempt to meet their needs, leaving their needs out of any solution will only result in them trying even harder to get those needs met, at perhaps greater cost.”
― Roxy Manning, How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy

“Ethnicity is a product of dogma, not a marker of human capacity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology

“Be a think tank of life,
not a septic tank of prejudice.
Stand messenger, stand human,
not a brainless host to malice.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology

“Dream of the King is the Dream of Civilization.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Black History is World History, we are all offsprings of Africa.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch

“Cosmos is colored.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Educating White People (Sonnet 2272)

The average colored person is ten times
smarter, wiser, braver, and stronger,
than most white people, not because
we are genetically superior,

but because, when an entire planet
is rigged in favor of white colonials
over the black, the brown, the latino,
arab, indian, chinese, turk, and what not,
we have to be exceptional to survive.

White people can be mediocre,
and still respected, glorified even,
but rest of us have to be Ramanujans,
Rumis, Naskars, just to be regarded as human.

Most of the world's geniuses are non-whites,
not because it's genetic, but because, like
white people inherit blonde hair and blue eyes,
or daddy's emeralds, we inherit generational
persecution, and any brain forced to endure
persecution as daily chore, becomes a powerhouse
of apparently supernatural mental faculties.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Most of the world's geniuses are non-whites, not because it's genetic, but because, like white people inherit blonde hair and blue eyes, or daddy's emeralds, we inherit generational persecution, and any brain forced to endure persecution as daily chore, becomes a powerhouse of apparently supernatural mental faculties.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“In English we say:
slow and steady wins the race.
In Naskarian we say:
care and duty heal the race.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Systemic racism continues hard and strong,
particularly against Indigenous people,
Why else would we be one of only four countries in 2007
to vote against a United Nations Global Declaration of Indigenous Rights?

We need to learn more.
We need to do better.
We are all woven together
in the fabric of the Earth
and over time
we will all thrive or fail
together.”
― Shellen Lubin

“I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn
will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder
how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves
still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke
every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore.”
― Martín Espada, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: Poems

“No Time for Objectivity (Naskaristana 2798)

There is no such thing as unbiased objectivity, we live in a world built on colonial atrocity, where exploitation is advancement and genocide is genesis -

in such a world only an absolute moron could stay unbiased and impartial, you have to be anti-privilege, anti-intolerance, anti-occupation, anti-sexism, anti anything and everything that tries to tyrannize existence -

without causing bodily harm, call out the monkeys in a million different ways - make intolerance the most unacceptable tradition in human history.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“We live in a world built on colonial atrocity, where exploitation is advancement and genocide is genesis - in such a world only an absolute moron could stay unbiased and impartial, you have to be anti-privilege, anti-intolerance, anti-occupation, anti-sexism, anti anything and everything that tries to tyrannize existence.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“No colored wants your guilt, just be human and acknowledge.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“For good reason the Negroes of the South had learned to fear and mistrust the white man's justice.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

“As I thought further I came to see that what we were really doing was withdrawing our coöperation from an evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our economic support from the bus company. The bus company, being an external expression of the system, would naturally suffer, but the basic aim was to refuse to coöperate with evil. At this point I began to think about Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience. I remembered how, as a college student, I had been moved when I first read this work. I became convinced that what we were preparing to do in Montgomery was related to what Thoreau had expressed. We were simply saying to the white community, 'We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

“An algorithm can't lie. It can only operate within the parameters you gave it. And we built those parameters on a system that was already broken.”
― Salus Saint, THE AUGUST BICYCLE: A Medical Science Fiction Novel