W. Kamau Bell Quotes

White folks, no matter how well-meaning or open-minded, have no true idea what it's like to be black in America. That's not a slam against white people or an accusation of latent bigotry. But the fact is that we all live in an Anglo-dominated society.

The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites.

Some people resented the fact I was trying to break a white man's record.

When I grew up in West Baltimore, anything associated - and I'm talking about my childhood - with white people 99 percent of the time was something malevolent, like it was an explanatory force for something bad.

The justice system isn't meant to work for people of color in this country.

Too often, the very institutions that are supposed to protect and serve our community have instead failed people of color, specifically our black community.

Whiteness is dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels. These processes and practices include basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.

Imagine if a mob of Black people wanted to go in the White House. Imagine what'd happen. It'd be tear gas. It'd be rubber bullets. It'd be the whole nine yards.

The white man will keep on granting tokenism; a few big Negroes will get big jobs, but the black masses will catch hell as long as they stay in the white man's house.

I was born on an island with 96 percent of the people black. But all the power and the economy was in the hands of white people who only formed four per cent.

White Americans today don't know what in the world to do because when they put us behind them, that's where they made their mistake... they put us behind them, and we watched every move they made.

The vast majority of murdered whites are murdered by other whites. That's why there's no national outrage when a white person is killed by a black person: it's not evidence of some underlying black violence problem directed against white people.

I was told by the general manager that a white player had received a higher raise than me. Because white people required more money to live than black people. That is why I wasn't going to get a raise.

It's not surprising to me that in a country born of racial genocide, the issue of race is still an open wound on the American soul. We haven't dealt with it.

If black people mistrust white people, they are mistrusting racism, and that is appropriate.

Seems to me that the institutions that function in this country are clearly racist, and that they're built upon racism.

What I want to know is how the white man, with the blood of black people dripping off his fingers, can have the audacity to be asking black people, 'Do they hate him?' That takes a lot of nerve.

Most of today's black convicts have come to understand that they are the most abused victims of an unrighteous order.

It's very hard to be black in this country and hate America. It's really hard to live like that. I would actually argue it's impossible to fully see yourself.

The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is not, you know, necessarily about, you know, whether you're a good person or not or whether you see black people, you know, on the street, and you're willing to shake their hands and be polite.

Sadly, whites are rarely open to what black and brown folks have to say regarding their ongoing experiences with racist mistreatment. And we are especially reluctant to discuss what that mistreatment means for us as whites: namely that we end up with more and better opportunities as the flipside of discrimination.

I am appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass in this country that I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.

The doublespeak of the American neoconservatives who conjured up the term "reverse racism" (was) to attack those who fought against White supremacy. This so-called ‘colorblind’ ideology has reversed the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and is actually commonsense among White Americans. It informs policymakers from the White House to the Supreme Court and has been used to justify the retreat from egalitarianism.

The effort we make in trying to get white people to let us alone or invest in us is looking pretty futile…. I am a reluctant separatist

You’ve got a reputation and it stinks….Since Detroit is more than 80 percent Black, it can’t be the white man’s fault. It’s not what he’s doing to you. It’s what you’re not doing.