Kenneth and Mamie Clark Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

The dark ghetto's invisible walls have been erected by the white society, by those who have power, both to confine those who have no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The dark ghettos are social, political, educational, and—above all—economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark
A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark
Negroes will not break out of the barriers of the ghetto unless whites transcend the barriers of their own minds, for the ghetto is to the Negro a reflection of the ghetto in which the white lives imprisoned. The poetic irony of American race relations is that the rejected Negro must somehow also find the strength to free the privileged white.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark
Social engineering is no more difficult than space engineering. If a program to get us to the moon didn't work, the engineers would try another program.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark
Let us make no mistake here: racism is a disease.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark
The discrepancy between identifying one's own color and indicating one's color preference is too great to be ignored. The negation of the color, brown, exists in the same complexity of attitudes in which there also exists knowledge of the fact that the child himself must be identified with that which he rejects.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark
The neoconservatives are formidable adversaries. They say that victims are the cause of their own victimization. "We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps," they say, and they want us to do the same even though they want to take away our boots.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark