Handy Examples of Famous Antiracists Saying or Implying All White People are Racist

Every now and then, an antiracist insists that antiracists don’t say all white people are racist. This is the quick guide for setting them straight:

The claim that all white people are racist is in the title of a book by the father of Critical Race Theory, Derrick Bell: Faces At The Bottom Of The Well: The Permanence Of Racism.

George H. Taylor provides relevant quotes from it:

[R]acism in America is not a curable aberration … .

[T]he sources of racial problems … grow more intractable with time.

Black people will never gain full equality in this country.

[R]acism is a permanent component of American life.

[R]acism is a permanent part of the American landscape.

[O]ppression on the basis of race returns time after time-in different guises, but it always returns.

[R]acism is permanent, the ultimate betrayal …

[R]acism lies at the center, not the periphery; in the permanent, not in the fleeting … .

White race reductionists are especially fond of making the claim:

“I believe that all people (white or of color) raised in a society where racism has been (and still is) so prevalent, will have internalized elements of racist thinking” — Tim Wise