Quotes About Diversity

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

It may even be that some of us know what it is like to be actually hated—hated for things we have no control over and cannot change.

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. "Here," they said, "this is beautiful, and if you are on this day 'worthy' you may have it.

For a nickel a month, Lady Jones did what whitepeople thought unnecessary if not illegal: crowded her little parlor with the colored children who had time for and interest in book learning.

I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races.

We must do all we can to imagine the Other before we presume to solve the problems work and life demand of us.

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle.

To use folk language, vernacular in a manner neither exotic nor comic, neither minstrelized nor microscopically analyzed.

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.

if she wishes to be American—to be known as such and to actually belong—she must become a thing unimaginable in her home country: she must become white.

Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn't limit my imagination; it expands it," Toni Morrison, who turns eighty-eight today

It was there I learned how I was not a person from my country, nor from my families. I was negrita. Everything. Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song - all of it cooked together in the color of my skin.

To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?

I don't foresee, or want, a color-blind, race-neutral environment. The nineteenth century was the time for that. It's too late, now. Our race-inflected culture not only exists, it thrives. The question is whether it thrives as a virus or a bountiful harvest of possibilities.

What are you? Some kinda mermaid?" one man had shouted, and reached hurriedly for his socks.

Yet here, not twenty miles away from a quiet, orderly community, there were women like none he knew or ever heard tell of.

an orchestra is unified not because all the instruments are the same, but because the different instruments are playing the same song. They are using their unique sounds to create beautiful harmonic textures.

We fail to embrace a oneness perspective rooted in kingdom theology, though, unless we, like Joshua, surrender to the truth that God's kingdom is not here to take sides. God's kingdom is not black. God's kingdom is not white. God's kingdom is not Hispanic. Nor is it Asian, Middle Eastern, or Indian. God did not come to take sides. God came to take over. And until we bow beneath the overarching rules set forth by the Ruler in

The definition of unity is oneness of purpose, not sameness of being. Like a quilt with various colors and patterns that have been blended together into a harmonious whole, a church in unity celebrates each person's unique place in the divine design.

You see, dear—I think there are two types of people in the world. Those who divide the world up into two kinds of people... and those who don't.

The only person of color in any of the photographs was a black waiter. Blacks were otherwise barred from the dance hall, as were locals of Mexican descent. In the Texas of that day, laws and customs known as Juan Crow subjected Hispanics to discrimination and segregation similar to that inflicted on African Americans.