Christopher Edley Jr. Quotes

Ours has not been a racially democratic society for 300 years.

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

We simply cannot insist that race should not matter when everything in life argues that it does.

American democracy is a failure. It is a miserable failure. It has failed because it is a limited and racial and divisible democracy …. How can we fight for democracy in Burma, a country we have not seen, when we don't have democracy in Birmingham, a city we have seen.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

You are exacerbating inequality rather than opening up opportunity.

If there is inequality, and that equates with colour, then I'm going to deal with it.

Freedom in America was not always flat. Racism made it un-flat, so that some people had privileges over other people.

As a white man who has had privileges that others could not depend on or take for granted, I've clearly had advantages over the course of my life.

While housing discrimination and segregation in 2005 still affect millions of people, that's not the way it has to be. Some things can change and should.

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

You can't be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval about affirmative action.

You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.

The greatest problem is not with flat-out white racists, but rather with the far larger number of Americans who believe intellectually in racial equality but are quietly oblivious to injustice around them.

I learned early that I had to work harder than the white kids and harder than the boys.

Sometimes black people really want to hold onto our oppression - 'This is ours! This belongs to us.' You can't just talk about equality for somebody else. Let's pass it on. Let's pass it on to somebody else. At the end of the day, it is all about inequality.

I still think in this country, and this might surprise you, the one thing that George Bush said as president that I do agree with, I love that phrase, 'the soft bigotry of low expectations.'

I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.

When you allow racial disparity and institutional inequity to affect one part of the country, eventually it's coming back to get everyone.

Equality ... is the result of human organization.... We are not born equal.

To unequal privileges among members of the same society the spirit of our nation is, with one accord, adverse.

To be a black in a white society isn’t to stand on level and equal ground. While the races may stand side be side, whites stand on history’s mountain and blacks stand in history’s hollow. Until we overcome unequal history we cannot overcome unequal opportunity.

There's not a white man in this country who can say he never benefited from being white.