Michelle Dean Quotes

Racism always exists cheek by jowl with, inside, and alongside culture and class. As a rule, it is inseparable from them. That is why, for example, food, language and names assume such importance in racial prejudice.

I think that racism has gotten more subtle, and it's not even racism anymore: it's placism. Like where you live or whether you went to community college or Harvard, and it exists within the race.

Blacks essentially play the race card, when necessary as a counter to white privilege.

I used to be obsessed with race. I'm more obsessed with class now.

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.

Hollywood hasn't changed. It is the most racist, anti-Indian institution in the world.

Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman.' Wouldn't they have to withdraw? New racism is no better than old racism.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

There's only one free person in this society, and he is white and male.

It's a real uphill challenge to battle the white-guyness.

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.

Rock 'n' roll is much easier if you're white.

It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.

White people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet.

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

Old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Many white Americans resist relinquishing the sense of entitlement skin color has given them throughout our national history.

I never knew the lower classes had such white skins.

We're not so much anti-black as we are pro-white.

The essence of racism is prejudice coupled with power ... Our primary experience is one of white privilege, even in places where whites may be a minority in the surrounding population.

I myself am a descendant of the European tribes, now called nations, that have established political, military, and economic dominance over the world. I confess to my sin of privilege and my reluctance to forego the perks my race and class afford me.

Barack Obama is an educated fool. He is viewed as the white man in blackface in the community.

This nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.

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