"Seems to me that the institutions that function in this country are clearly racist, and that they're built upon racism"
About this Quote
“Seems to me” is the bait: a conversational shrug that lowers the temperature just long enough to land an accusation that’s meant to be un-ignorable. Carmichael isn’t offering a hot take about individual prejudice; he’s indicting the operating system. “Institutions that function” is the key phrase. He’s not talking about broken agencies that fail by accident, but the ones that run smoothly, get funded, and deliver results on schedule. If those are “clearly racist,” then racism isn’t a glitch in American life - it’s a feature with a maintenance budget.
The line carries the strategic pivot that Carmichael helped popularize in the mid-1960s as “Black Power” gained momentum: stop pleading for inclusion into supposedly neutral systems and start naming power as the problem. “Built upon racism” makes the claim historical, not temperamental. It suggests that even reforms that polish the surface can’t fully cleanse structures designed for racial hierarchy: policing, housing markets, school funding, voting regimes. The subtext is blunt: if you keep treating racism as a matter of attitudes, you’ll keep prescribing education and goodwill to a machine that runs on dispossession.
Context matters. Carmichael is speaking in the aftermath of civil rights victories that, on paper, promised equal access - and in the lived reality of northern segregation, economic exclusion, and state violence that proved how limited those victories were. The sentence is engineered to force a choice: either admit that “functioning” can mean “functioning for some,” or keep clinging to a national myth where fairness is the default and inequality is a misunderstanding.
The line carries the strategic pivot that Carmichael helped popularize in the mid-1960s as “Black Power” gained momentum: stop pleading for inclusion into supposedly neutral systems and start naming power as the problem. “Built upon racism” makes the claim historical, not temperamental. It suggests that even reforms that polish the surface can’t fully cleanse structures designed for racial hierarchy: policing, housing markets, school funding, voting regimes. The subtext is blunt: if you keep treating racism as a matter of attitudes, you’ll keep prescribing education and goodwill to a machine that runs on dispossession.
Context matters. Carmichael is speaking in the aftermath of civil rights victories that, on paper, promised equal access - and in the lived reality of northern segregation, economic exclusion, and state violence that proved how limited those victories were. The sentence is engineered to force a choice: either admit that “functioning” can mean “functioning for some,” or keep clinging to a national myth where fairness is the default and inequality is a misunderstanding.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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