Quotes About Diversity

As I write this, there are mainstream educators trying to discredit efforts to diversify the academic canon by giving them the dreaded label "politically correct"—now known familiarly on campus as "P.C." (which, as Robin Morgan has pointed out, might well stand for "Plain Courtesy")—as if centuries of exclusion had not been the height (or depth) of politics.

Learning to accept and even love difference, as she pointed out, is important for the future of the human race. There is great comfort in realizing that differences within a family have an important purpose.

This is all the more important today when we have world leaders who don't respect differences. That lack of respect is a dictatorship.

Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.

This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet

We don't win by imitating what we're against.

When people of color are in the majority instead of the minority, audiences are often the best education that white listeners can have.

This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy. It may just be their fear and guilt talking: What if I am treated as I have treated others? But with all the power and money that is behind it, this backlash could imprison us in a hierarchy all over again. As

I soon learned there was a very Indian habit of asking personal questions. It

Women are always saying, 'We can do anything that men can do.' But men should be saying, 'We can do anything that women can do.

when God is depicted only as a white man, only white men seem godly. They

There are really not many jobs that actually acquire a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.

Since Native students often prosper in cooperative rather than competitive classrooms—as do a lot of female students, regardless of where they come from—I've been asked to talk about the feminist movement and efforts to change classrooms into learning circles.

Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, "Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.

this country is transforming before our eyes. In thirty years or so, the majority will no longer be European Americans; the first generation of mostly babies of color has already been born. This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy. It may just be their fear and guilt talking: What if I am treated as I have treated others?

Also racism and sexism are intertwined—as Mrs. Greene and millions of others experienced—and cannot be uprooted separately.

I'm not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. It's time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.

I discovered that Native languages, Cherokee and others--like Bengali and other ancient languages--didn't have gendered pronouns like "he" and "she.

not everyone wants the same thing. A just law can be flexible. To be just, a law has to be flexible. She has saved the day.

People nod at the idea that when God is depicted inly as a white man, only white men seem godly. They laugh at the idea that priests dressed in skirts try to trump women's birth-giving power by baptising with imitation birth fluid, calling us reborn, and going women one better by promising everlasting life.

Soon we discovered the intensity of interest in the simple idea that each person's shared humanity and individual uniqueness far outweighed any label by group of birth, whether sex, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religious heritage, or anything else.

We can, as Martha Nussbaum (2010) suggests, benefit from the enlarged and varied imagination that literature, films, and other cultural products afford us to start to occupy different positionings than we usually occupy.

I want to cover all areas that can be depicted visually. This ranges from fairytales to attempts to enter the abstract and view oneself as a social outcast or someone struggling to stay alive.

The paths may be different but the laws remain universal.