Jon Stewart: Your mother is from Kansas. She's a white woman. Your father, African. Are you concerned that you may go into the voting booth and… your white half will all of a sudden decide, "I can't do this"?Barack Obama: Yeah. It's a problem.

—From The Daily Show, October 2008

politics history USA race

More quotations tagged with “race”

A minority group has "arrived" only when it has the right to produce some fools and scoundrels without the entire group paying for it.

—Carl T. Rowan

fools race discrimination

If a white man falls off a chair drunk, it's just a drunk. If a Negro does, it's the whole damn Negro race.

perception race blackness whiteness

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War II for no really good reason by our most liberal president. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slavelike inequalities.

—Theodore M. Hesburgh

history religion America race

When we're unemployed, we're called lazy; when the whites are unemployed, it's called a depression.

—Jesse Jackson

USA race blackness unemployment

I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.

—Dick Gregory

poverty race Christmas Santa Claus whiteness

History

24 Oct 2015 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

Jon Stewart: Your mother is from Kansas. She's a white woman. Your father, African. Are you concerned that you may go into the voting booth and . . . your white half will all of a sudden decide, "I can't do this"?Barack Obama: Yeah. It's a problem.