Maya Angelou Quotes About Racism

• Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

  Maya Angelou

  Life, Powerful, Past

• Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

  Maya Angelou

  Life, Travel, Laughter

  Maya Angelou (2011). “Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now”, p.8, Bantam

• The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams.

  Maya Angelou

  Justice, Diversity, Racism

  Maya Angelou (2011). “Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now”, p.57, Bantam

• The whites were really brutishly ignorant, blitheringly, so they killed people sometimes - just came into the African-American community and maimed people because they didn't agree with God's choice for the colors of the people's skin.

  Maya Angelou

  Color, Racism, People

• We are growing up. We are growing up! Out of the idiocies - the ignorances of racism and sexism and ageism and all those ignorances.

  Maya Angelou

  Growing Up, Ignorance, Racism

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• In today's climate in our country, which is sickened with the pollution of pollution, threatened with the prominence of AIDS, riddled with burgeoning racism, rife with growing huddles of the homeless, we need art and we need art in all forms. We need all methods of art to be present, everywhere present, and all the time present.

  Maya Angelou

  Country, Time, Art

• There's racism and sexism and ageism and all sorts of idiocies. But bad news is not news. We've had bad news as a species for a long time. We've had slavery and human sacrifice and the holocaust and brutalities of such measure.

  Maya Angelou

  Sacrifice, Long, Racism

  Source: teentalkingcircles.org

• The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.

  Maya Angelou

  Life, Sports, Country

  Maya Angelou (2009). “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, p.220, Random House

• All of my history as an African-American woman, as a Jewish woman, as a Muslim woman. I'm bringing everything I ever knew, and all the stories I've read - everything good, strong, kind and powerful. I bring it all with me into every situation, and I will not allow my life to be minimized by anybody's racism or sexism or ageism.

  Maya Angelou

  Strong, Powerful, Racism

  Interview with Oprah Winfrey, www.oprah.com. December 2000.

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