Claim:
The quote, "I don't want to hear about 'lazy immigrants' from a race of people who enslaved a whole other race of people to do all the work they didn't want to do" is attributed to former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
In October 2020, a quote about the hypocrisy of white people calling immigrants "lazy" was frequently shared alongside an image of former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. The purported statement was, "I don't want to hear about 'lazy immigrants' from a race of people who enslaved a whole other race of people to do all the work they didn't want to do."
Powell did not make such a statement.
These words were first written in a Jan. 15, 2019, tweet by Twitter user @xziondestinyx. The statement garnered over 122,000 retweets and was shared as a screenshot extensively across multiple platforms. The first time we can find a post attributing the statement to Powell occurred months later. As such, the quote is misattributed to Powell.