Quotes About Diversity

Color must suffice. It has brought us to this night, this discussion, and it will take us into the future. All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together.

The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race – which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for ourselves and our children? "For

True, you couldn't treat an Irishman like an African, white nigger or no.

If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America.

another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

The previous night in Tennessee, Ridgeway had called Cora and her mother a flaw in the American scheme. If two women were a flaw, what was a community? —

or at least recognizing that he carried himself differently than other colored boys his age and taking this for industry.

Black hands built the White House

According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were.

I contain multitudes, most of them flawed.

The Theresa desegregated in 1940, after the neighborhood tipped over from Jews and Italians and became the domain of Southern blacks and West Indians. Everyone who came uptown had crossed some variety of violent ocean.

If two women were a flaw, what was a community?

Every state is different,' Lumbly was saying. 'Each one a state of possibility, with its own customs and way of doing things. Moving through them, you'll see the breadth of the country before you reach your final stop.

It's not so different up there, Lila Mae. They have the same white people up there they got down here. It might look different. It might feel different. But it's the same.

Let one colored in and you're integrated. Let two in, you got a race war as they try to kiss up to whitey.

The black city and the white city: overlapping, ignorant of each other, separate and connected by tracks.

There is always room for at least two truths.

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.

All the lives we could live, all the people we would never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.

So many times people would come up to him after his lectures and say that they wished there were more like him. What do you mean? he would ask. Immediately they would realize what they had said and drop their heads. As if he didn't encounter people like himself every single day, at every single angle. As if he were the only sort of Palestinian they could stomach.

That is the fantastic thing about the National Socialists, that they simultaneously share in a community of ideas with Soviet Russia and with Zion.

A generation has more in common, after all, than a nation, than a profession.

As a society, we need to get lots more flexible about what constitutes beauty. It isn't a particular hair color or a particular body type; it's the woman who grew the hair and lives in the body. Keeping this in mind can only make things better. (341)