Quotes about Race

Few things give rise to imprecise rhetoric like the issue of race. It's understandable, but damaging.

If a man could outpace his shadow, he would still find it waiting for him at the finishing line.

Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

I was black before I was a Christian. Martin and Malcolm, therefore, had to go together, which meant being unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.

If human power in history—among races, nations, and other collectives as well as individuals—is self-interested power, then "the revelation of divine goodness in history" must be weak and not strong.

Living in a world of white oppressors, blacks have no time for a neutral God.

Black men don't like to be called 'boys,' but women accept being called 'girls.'

Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don't think it's given the proper credit. It has changed America immensely. I'm going to make a very bold statement: Hip-hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations.

The race is short between the cradle and the grave!

I have noticed that no other group of people in the United States truly loves America as a whole like white people do.

Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets, and are to have the greatest, and use them the greatest, Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.

It is, then, not simply a question of black power or white power, but of how meaningfully to reenfranchise human power. This, as I think Martin Luther King understood, is the real point, the real gift to America, of the struggle of the black people. In accepting the humanity of the black race, the white people will not be giving accommodation to an alien people; it will be receiving into itself half of its own experience, vital and indispensable to it, which it has so far denied at great cost.