People Of Color Quotes

“One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies and the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade and the market for sexual services. At the same time, though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents”
― Angela Davis

“We have to walk around being perfect all the time just to be seen as human. Don't you ever get tired of being a symbol? Don't you ever just want to be human?”
― Christina Hammonds Reed, The Black Kids

“The first time I was ever called ugly, I was thirteen. It was a rich friend of my brother Carlton's, over to shoot guns in the field.
"Why you crying girl?" Constantine asked me in the kitchen.
I told her what the boy had called me, tears streaming down my face,
"Well? Is you?"
I blinked, paused my crying. "Is I what?"
"Now you look a here, Eugenia" - because Constantine was the only one who'd occasionally follow Mama's rule. "Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be hurtful, mean person. Is you one a them peoples?"
"I don't know. I don't think so." I sobbed.
Constantine sat down next to me, at the kitchen table. I heard the cracking of her swollen joints. She pressed her thumb hard in the palm of my hand, something we both knew meant 'Listen. Listen to me.'

"Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision." Constantine was so close, I could see the blackness of her gums. "You gone have to ask yourself, 'Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?'

She kept her thumb pressed hard in my hand. I nodded that I understood. I was just smart enough to realize she meant white people. And even though I still felt miserable, and knew what I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother's white child. All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Step across the color of hate into the rainbow of love, and you shall find life, liberty and happiness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Earthquakin' Egalitarian: I Die Everyday So Your Children Can Live

“Can someone tell me why a person of color would need a white man to save her? Like that’s what I keep on seeing in the media when it comes to POC women talking about POC feminism. Hello? We need a POC woman to stand up for all women. I’ll take the lead!”
― Laika Constantino

“a white girl walking with a black girl is always seen as black-man-friendly”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

“There are many variables that have nothing to do with a person’s education, experience, or accomplishments that will significantly influence his or her standing for higher-level positions and opportunities for advancement.”
― Brenda Harrington, Access Denied: Addressing Workplace Disparities and Discrimination

“Oona's mother resisted the notion that violence was happening, or that substantial violence was happening, and said that if there was violence it was because there were paid aggressors on the other side, saboteurs, and that they were trying to kill both our defenders and our people in general, and they were sometimes killing their own kind, to make us look bad, and also because some of their own kind supported us, and they killed them for that, and that the main point was separation, it was not that we were better than them, although we were better than them, how could you deny it, but that we needed our own places, where we could take care of our own, because our people were in trouble, so many of us in trouble, and the dark people could have their own places, and there they could do their own dark things, or whatever, and we would not stop them, but we would not participate in our own eradication, that had to end, and now there was no time to wait, now they were converting us, and lowering us, and that was a sign, a sign that if we did not act in this moment there would be no more moments left and we would be gone.”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

“In country after country we see white men building empires on the sweat and suffering of colored people.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“Once the aspirations and appetites of the world have been whetted by the marvels of Western technology and the self-image of a people awakened by religion, one cannot hope to keep people locked out of the earthly kingdom of wealth, health and happiness. Either they share in the blessings of the world or they organize to break down and overthrow those structures or governments which stand in the way of their goals.

Former generations could not conceive of such luxury, but their children now take this vision and demand that it become a reality. And when they look around and see that the only people who do not share in the abundance of Western technology are colored people, it is an almost inescapable conclusion that their condition and their exploitation are somehow related to their color and the racism of the white Western world.

This is a treacherous foundation for a world house. Racism can well be that corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on Western civilization.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“Latin not Lethal (The Sonnet)

Yes I am latino and proud,
That doesn't make me a thug.
Yes I am brown in color and loud,
That doesn't mean I'm a lethal bug.
Some of us can't speak English,
That doesn't make us second-rate.
We care for family as much as you,
In friendship we walk to the world's end.
Savage imperialists walked on our corpses,
While they snatched our lands and homes.
Yet you call us illegal and dangerous,
Showing no remorse or desire to atone!
None of us can undo the past I know.
Our kids may walk together, let's make sure.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Earthquakin' Egalitarian: I Die Everyday So Your Children Can Live

“The problem is not that you see color, the problem is that you assume character from color.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Karadeniz Chronicle: The Novel

“If you try to force the mingling of people who are not yet ready to mingle, and don't want to mingle, development cannot succeed economically.”
― Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

“Without access to mentors and organization sponsors who can provide much-needed advice, coaching, and counsel, many of us are not prepared for the real game that is being played. It is as if we are trying to play soccer on a baseball diamond.”
― Brenda Harrington, Access Denied: Addressing Workplace Disparities and Discrimination

“It never really matters whether you are black, brown, red, yellow, or white but what really matters is that the light of God and Truth with you shines bright.”
― Aiyaz Uddin

“...lies...drive immigrants, and people of color...to change who we are in order to make us palatable, or at least tolerable, to white America. I didn't find freedom in assimilation because there is no freedom in racist ideas. Assimilation requires that the story we tell about the United States and about white people is an uplifting, inspiring, sugarcoated version of the facts, in which the whip, guns, and racist motives must remain hidden. But it was the truth about this country, the knowledge of its ugly dirty secrets, that set me free.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“Once returned to his own home, Anders wondered whether the rifle actually made him safer, for he felt he was all alone, and it was better to be nonconfrontational than to stand up to trouble, and he imagined that somehow people were more likely to come for him if they found out he was armed, even though they would not find out, even though so many folks were armed, he just had this sense that it was essential not to be seen as a threat, for to be seen as a threat, as dark as he was, was to risk one day being obliterated.”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

“With the resurgence of radicalized white power movements, many are now forced to confront the reality called white supremacy that the rest of us have had to deal with our entire lives.

For many, resisting meant protesting. For the rest of us, our resistance is simply walking out of our house and breathing, just holding our head up, smiling, having hope, and telling our children that America belongs to them.

For us, surviving is an act of resistance.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“The reality is that most people of color learn early in America that we will have to work twice as hard to get half as far, and when we fail, no one will help us fall up.

Immigrants, people of color, and women learn early that in order to make it in Amreeka you have to daft punk it through life. You have to do everything harder, better, faster, stronger, and smarter. Those are just the rules. The streets of Amreeka aren't paved with gold; they're paved with blood. As an immigrant, you'll take a beating but you'll be like Rick Ross and keep hustling. if Bob works eight hours a day, you work ten. If Samantha works late on Friday, then you work on Saturday. You go twenty feet just to get to ten feet.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“As a person of color in America, you need to fly to reach the hallowed gates of wealth and mainstream success while others can just walk. "Good" is not good enough. You have to be exceptional, especially when you don't have the legacy admissions, the generational wealth, the mentors who look like you and come from your communities, and an entire system that benefits one skin color and gender at the detriment of others.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“Proximity to Whiteness can help immigrants and people of color literally survive in this country. Your othering will be minimized, and if you're lucky, you can be spared from discrimination, profiling, and ending up on the wrong registries.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“Fair & Lovely cream sells like hotcakes all around South Asia, even though everyone knows it's bullshit and doesn't help make you either "fair" or "lovely." You can never wipe off the brown no matter how hard you try, no matter how hard you pray, but, still, people aspire and hope maybe, one day, one bottle will contain a magical elixir that takes them to Whiteness.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“Whiteness, like herpes, lingers forever. If you travel across South Asia, for example, you'll look at all the ads promoting beauty products and ask yourself why everyone looks like a white person from New Jersey with a summer tan. In fact, beauty is still often measured by saaf rang, or clean skin color, which refers to "light skin tone." Fair & Lovely cream sells like hotcakes all around South Asia, even though everyone knows it's bullshit and doesn't help make you either "fair" or "lovely." You can never wipe off the brown no matter how hard you try, no matter how hard you pray, but, still, people aspire and hope maybe, one day, one bottle will contain a magical elixir that takes them to Whiteness.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“The Patriot Act vastly expanded our domestic security apparatus and allowed the government to surveil Americans under the guise of combating terrorism. Americans are historically fine with castrating their own civil liberties, because we'd rather feel safe than actually be free, especially when our illusory feelings of safety can come at the expense of people of color, immigrants, and Muslims--you know, "them.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“If you are what they call a "person of color," it seems your path will be beset with more challenges, setbacks, and villains than the rest. In addition to climate change, cancer, heart attacks, diabetes, and hypertension, this thing called racism--which some claim no longer exists--apparently also kills. Men of color, especially Black men and especially those who are poor, die younger than the rest.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“In America, communities of color have always put our "economic anxieties" second to placate the economic anxieties of "real Americans" from the "Rust Belt." We just pray and hope they will do the right thing and vote for a qualified candidate who doesn't want to put babies in camps. Sometimes it works, and other times we get Trump. If we are to be honest with ourselves, the group that has historically always played identity politics is white voters, and the rest of us have been hijacked by their rage, fear, and anxiety. Theirs are the grievances of "regular Americans from the heartland." When we voice our concerns, we are "playing the race card," engaging in victimhood, not pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, abusing political correctness, and enforcing cancel culture and affirmative action.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“Historically, whenever Black people and people of color made progress in America, the demons of white rage would rise with a fury to choke and wrestle this country back to 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It was inevitable that Obama's election would unleash and invigorate the same malevolent forces that had always existed and corrupted America's promise for the rest of us. I knew it. Many people of color knew it and lived it. Even Obama knew it.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“The more you try to bury us, the firmer our roots. The more you try to silence us, the louder our song.”
― Phoenix Ning, Paragon Seven

“Because children of color are much more likely to be exposed to lead at a young age, it is devastating to think about what will happen to an entire generation of Flint children. What promises can you make to a child about the world of possibility ahead of them when the state has poisoned their bloodstreams and bones such that their behavioral self-control and language comprehension are impaired? How many graves has the government of Michigan set aside for the casualties of the water crisis that will end with a gunshot in fifteen years' time? We all know how cops respond to kids of color with intellectual disabilities or mental illness.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“Take care of your brother, Lydia, and take care of yourself; be at all times guarded. And never forget that this country despises above all else this thing they call people of color, sees them not as people at all but as harbingers of a future it can’t control. I remember liking that moniker: of color. What a thing to be in a country so black and white.”
― Omar El Akkad, A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers