Explore Quotes on White

He put the coffee in the cup. He put the milk in the cup of coffee. He put the sugar in the white coffee, with the tea-spoon he stirred. He drank the white coffee and he put the cup down. Without speaking to me.

Black is beautiful when it is a slum kid studying to enter college, when it is a man learning new skills for a new job, or a slum mother battling to give her kids a chance for a better life. But white is beautiful, too, when it helps change society to make our system work for black people also. White is ugly when it oppresses blacks-and so is black ugly when black people exploit other blacks. No race has a monopoly on vice or virtue, and the worth of an individual is not related to the color of his skin.

Most of the time when "universal" is used, it's just a euphamism for "white"; white themes, white significance, white culture.

We were trying to transform America, not triumph over white folk.

Those who came to the United States didn't realize they were white until they got here. They were told they were white. They had to learn they were white. An Irish peasant coming from British imperial abuse in Ireland during the potato famine in the 1840s, arrives in the United States. You ask him or her what they are. They say, "I am Irish." No, you're white. "What do you mean, I am white?" And they point me out. "Oh, I see what you mean. This is a strange land."

When I care about black liberation, it is because I care about white liberation.

We shall be free only together, black and white. We shall survive only together, black and white. We can be human only together, black and white.

"Native" always means people who belong someplace else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows that the white race does not really think they belong anywhere, because they think of everybody else as native.

Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pcanet, and other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun.

Just imagine how boring life would be if we were all the same. My idea of a perfect world is one in which we really appreciated each other's differences: Short, tall; Democrat, Republican; black, white; gay, straight-a world in which all of us are equal, but definitely not the same.

It occurred to me when I was thirteen and wearing white gloves and Mary Janes and going to dancing school, that no one should have to dance backward all their lives.

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.

The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the Black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that twenty-two million Black people have not risen up against their oppressors in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria and even by the democratic traditions.

Speaking like this doesn't mean that we're anti-white, but it does mean we're anti-exploitation, we're anti-degradation, we're anti-oppression.

When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

Why should anyone think a white skin superior in evaluating the qualities of human life? I did not really admire a white skin so much myself. Did I not prefer the brown skin that came with exposure to the sun?

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.

The Negro loves America enough to criticize her fundamentally. Most white Americans simply can't be bothered.

We are not fighting for the right to be like you. We respect ourselves too much for that. When we advocate freedom, we mean freedom for us to be black, or brown, and you to be white, and yet live together in a free and equal society. This is the only way that integration can bring dignity for both of us.

We have to undo the millions of little white lies that America told itself and the world about the American Black man.