Jonathan Coleman Quotes

If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

I don't think any of us that are white can ever fully understand what it's like to be a black person in America today.

I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.

If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.

Clearly, the Obama presidency hasn't wiped out racial prejudices.

In spite of what some people claim, we are not in a post-racial era. I think it's still an important issue to bring up.

Everybody is mouthing the platitudes in the law and everywhere else, where it serves a purpose that we're a color-blind society. But we're not. We're as color conscious as we've ever been.

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.

There are people out there like Fox News who, every time a Black person complains in public of how we are treated in our society, is accused of “playing the race card.”

It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.

I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

The scars and stains of racism are still deeply embedded in the American society.

We've come a long way from the days of Jim Crow, and yes, we elected a black president, but racism lives.

I think the most harmful belief passed on to me - not always directly - was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up.

I think race in America is a huge one. That's something that needs to be confronted, certainly.

I sometimes think they should have said 'Black Lives Matter Too,' because that is really what is being said. The outcry is that historically and presently, the feeling is that black lives don't matter as much as white lives because we don't see the same type of things happening to them.

I think the O.J. Simpson trial was a revelation about the ongoing patterns of racial difference in American society.

The only reason race matters is because of racism.

The only difference between me and those other great Yankees is my skin color.

The truth is, no, we don't live in a post-racial state anywhere in America, and this is particularly true in Hollywood.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.

I don't think many people understand what racism is. The intellectuals use it like toilet paper; it's something they can use. It's not something they live.

If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.

There's no such thing as reverse racism.

While we dance in the streets and pat ourselves on the back for being a nation great enough to reach beyond racial divides to elect our first African-American president, let us not forget that we remain a nation still proudly practicing prejudice.