Quotes About Diversity

Most of the concert reviews in the next day's paper would describe the crowd milling about the Slumberland as "diverse" without saying what made them so. In polite democratic society it's important to note stratification but impolite to label the layers.

Yes, being black is a full-time job: sometimes you are invisible, other times you are hyper-visible," he says. "Sometimes you are welcome, other times you are not. The thermostat is always moving and you have to keep adapting to find some comfort level. Richard Pryor used to talk about going to Africa and people there telling him he was white. Even though he was black, he just wasn't black enough.

instead of simply saying, "A rabbi, a priest, and a black guy walk into a bar," he'd say, "The subjects of this joke are three males, two of whom are clergymen, one of the Jewish faith, the other an ordained Catholic minister. The religion of the African-American respondent is undetermined, as is his educational level. The setting for the joke is a licensed establishment where alcohol is served. No, wait. It's a plane.

You can't force integration, boy. The people who want to integrate will integrate.

You know why white people don't ever just happen to be white? Because they all think they've just happened to have been touched by God, that's why!" I

Who was I kidding? I'm a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I'm not Rudolf Hess, P. W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I'm a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe.

I don't care if you're black, white, brown, yellow, red, green, or purple.' We've all said it. Posited as proof of our nonprejudicial ways, but if you painted any one of us purple or green, we'd be mad as hell.

As the psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm ('That's the way it's done') into an explicit observation ('That's what our tribe happens to do now')." This is the point that Herodotus was making when he told the story of the Greeks and the Indians.

For better or worse, then, my attack on empathy is nonpartisan. Or to put it more positively, individuals of all political orientations—liberal, conservative, libertarian, hard right, hard left, all of us—can join hands and work together in the fight against empathy.

I don't get why people are so intrigued with being normal.

Rah speaks prophetically. That is, if we don't learn diversity and racial harmony in our own country, how can we go into the world? To aspiring missionaries he writes, "If you are a white Christian wanting to be a missionary in this day and age, and you have never had a nonwhite mentor, then you will not be a missionary. You will be a colonialist. Instead of taking the gospel message into the world, you will take an Americanized version of the gospel."7

The "business as usual" agency has a board made up of white, middle-aged or older males working with a "from us to them" attitude. The "business as usual" church supports crosscultural missionaries, but these folks are all the same culture and ethnicity of the majority of the members of the church.

Stephen Prothero's God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World speaks directly to this issue. A professor at Boston University, Prothero observes that the claim that all religions are fundamentally the same is an insult to all religions, because they have different benchmarks and different goals and different frameworks and different worldviews.

William Seymour, a key figure in the Azusa Street revivals that birthed the modern Pentecostal movement, came to believe, according to Harvey Cox, that "the truest sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit was not speaking in tongues but the demise of racial barriers between Christians.."Z6

though the Western world has dominated Christianity for much of Christian history, Christianity is now primarily a nonwhite, non-Western, nonwealthy religion.

Our conversation revealed the differences between their paradigm and mine. They were sent by a U.S.-based ministry that defined "gospel-preaching churches" as non-Pentecostal and noncharismatic, male-led, emotionally quiet, hymn-singing and (implicitly) led by white missionaries. My paradigm was more along the lines of "go where God is going.

From some vantage points, the global church seems to be getting more fragmented, like the description of the people of Israel in the age of the Judges, when "everyone did as they saw fit" (Judg 21:25).

The pluralistic spirit of the age challenges the very raison d'etre of mission in a globalized world. If Jesus is not the only way, how does that affect our desire to go to dangerous, difficult places and into hardship situations? In the face of global pluralism, the church must proclaim Jesus Christ with theological integrity, critical contextualization and countercultural preaching.

What does it mean to live in what Fareed Zakaria calls a "post-American world"?' He summarizes the main idea of his book by that name in the first sentence: "This is a book not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else."2

Not all developing countries are the same.

Contrary to popular definitions, true tolerance means 'putting up with error' - not 'accepting all views'. We don't tolerate what we enjoy or endorse - say, chocolate, or roses, or Mozart's music. By definition, we tolerate what we don't approve of or what we believe to be false.

Do you think there's intelligent life in space?' He grunted. 'Mum always says they'll be just like us. But I'd hate it if they were just like us.

Where you live in the world should not determine whether you live in the world.

America is not just a country. It's an idea.