Big Freedia Quotes

In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.

Racism is systemic: It's oppression that's built into the laws, legislation, into the way neighborhoods are policed, and into job opportunities and health care and education.

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

The reality is we have allowed systemic racism to continue through all these years.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

Racism and injustice and violence sweep our world, bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death.

By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching.

Social equity is based on justice; politics change on the opinion of the time. The black man's skin will be a mark of social inferiority so long as white men are conceited, ignorant, unjust, and prejudiced. You cannot legislate these qualities out of the white - you must steal them out by teaching, illustration, and example.

Baby, black promoters oppressed me before white promoters ever got hold of me. Don't talk skin to me.

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

America is yours [Whites] today because of crime and violence.

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

He shatters the myth of white supremacy once and for all.

I suggest that what has happened to the white Southerner is in some ways much worse than what has happened to the Negroes there ... One has to assume that he is a man like me, but he does not know what drives him to use the club, to menace with a gun, and to use a cattle prod against a woman's breasts ... Their moral lives have been destroyed by a plague called color.

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

You spend your whole lifetime in your occupation, actually making life clever, easy and convenient for white people. But when you have to get transportation home, you are denied an equal accommodation. Our existence was for the white man's comfort and well-being; we had to accept being deprived of just being human.

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

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

Racism has its boot squarely wedged on the neck of black communities, and we don't want to be told that hard work and responsibility are the answer.

As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.

As much as we want to say racism is dead, it's still rearing its ugly head constantly.

We need to recognize that racism has never been subtle, though it has gone underreported.

Racial prejudice boils down to the deeply anti-American message that some people are born to fail.

I look at racism as one of the social demons. And, in its worst, it's violent and it's a systemic commitment to oppression.

I don't wanna believe that racism exists, but the more I wish it away, the more I realize it's in our system.