Constance Baker Motley Quotes

I don't think that the country is ever ready to have the conversation about race.

White identity politics has permeated our rhetoric.

The mantra for the Obama campaign and their surrogates has focused on one thing regarding race, which is to take every opportunity to depict the Republican Party a group of rich white racists.

My answer to the racial problem in America is to not deal with it at all. The founding fathers dealt with it when they made the Constitution.

Every single thing in my life is built around race.

I'm one of those people who is colour blind to a certain degree. And that doesn't mean I'm not acutely aware of race in our country and abroad and in the world. I know what's going on, and I'm very aware of it.

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

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.

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

The most glaring aspect of white privilege is that when someone is described neutrally - without indicating color or ethnicity - more often than not, people will assume that the person is white. That assumption indicates an uncomfortable truth: in our society, whiteness determines humanity.

So we've never had a President of the United States ask anything of black citizens. And I think the reason for that is they've all felt that if they presume to do that, that they would be stigmatized as racist.

We're not able to hide behind myths of this being a post-racial society because Donald Trump has outlined exactly how a large portion of America feels.

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.

We need to have a more thoughtful, two-sided conversation about racial issues in this country.

I do not claim to be an expert on race in America.

I have spent years studying what it means to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet is deeply divided by race.

I think we are aware that post-racialism isn't real, right? I mean, I hope so. I kind of joke that we're post-post-racial.

If we want to think about racism and how it might play out in drug policy, we have to think about the trial of George Zimmerman. We think about the prosecution, when they said "race is not a factor." It's so dishonest.

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

As important as the presidency is, that's not the only thing to take a look at in determining the racial health of the United States.

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

I am hopeful about any future for whites in this country, but not entirely optimistic.

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 have nothing to do with racism in America; it was here when I got here.