Food for thought .... Quotes about Racism

1
"The conquest of the Earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it."
Author Joseph Conrad, in Heart of Darkness

2
"Contrary to today's stereotypes, racists do not always chew tobacco and drive pickup trucks with gun racks. They wear silk shirts, treat women as possessions, and talk about human rights at cocktail parties far from communities of people of color. The men in pickup trucks are just as likely to be warm and caring as the high-minded liberals are to be racists."
Wilma Mankiller, U.S. Cherokee Nation tribal leader and activist for women's rights

3
"I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was meant to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, code books, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks."
Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women in Wellesley, Mass.

4
"You say that by baptism I shall be like you: I am black and you are white, I must have my skin taken off then in order to be like you. "
Olivier LeJeune, Canada's first documented slave, a 10-year old-boy, 1632. From 2005 Toronto Star review of Where Race Does Not Matter: The New Spirit of Modernity by Cecil Foster

5
"It's possible nowadays to write about Toronto and (not) have any description at all that's vaguely Toronto. You can describe Toronto and not (write) about white people at all; that's the new Toronto, the kind of thing Dionne Brand does so well. She reinvents Bathurst Street."
Austin Clarke, author, in Toronto Star (Feb. 9, 2008)

6
"Racism is a refuge for the ignorant. It seeks to divide and to destroy. It is the enemy of freedom, and deserves to be met head-on and stamped out."
Pierre Berton, author

7
"We are encouraged to believe that everything is possible in this country and my own adventure represents for me and for others a spark of hope that I want kept alive for the greatest number."
Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada, installation speech, 2005

8
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, comedian

9
"The heart never knows the colour of the skin. "
Chief Dan George