To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships
—W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk
If some folks have buried their racial prejudices, the chances are that they’ve got the graves marked and will have no trouble disinterring their pet hates.
—Josephine Lawrence
I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.
—Dick Gregory
When we're unemployed, we're called lazy; when the whites are unemployed, it's called a depression.
—Jesse Jackson
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
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.
—Bill Cosby
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
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
I am quite sure… I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices, nor caste prejudices, nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.
—Mark Twain