Quotes About Stereotyping

The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.150

It is odd, when you think about it, that we accuse racists of "discrimination." This is the very thing of which they are by definition incapable: They think all members of certain groups are the same.

If you've got a Mexican last name, you've got a strike against you.

Cuando lo vieron ganar dinero, dijeron: es un comerciante. Cuando lo vieron repartir el dinero, dijeron: es un ambicioso. Cuando lo vieron rechazar los honores, dijeron: es un aventurero. Cuando lo vieron rechazar el trato social, dijeron: es un borrico.

She was so unlike the other women he'd slept with. Course, they were whores, mostly...

They call you names because they don't want to think of you as like them.

I just get so fed up with seeing the same things written about me. If I see the words 'ice queen' attached to me, I feel like banging my head against the wall. There's this perception that I can only be in a film if I have a glass of champagne in my hand and a stately home in the background.

The latest horror to hit the U.S. looks to have been caused by people of Middle Eastern origin, bearing Muslim names. Again, shame. This fuels more hatred for a religion and a people who have nothing to do with these events.

where Chinese immigrants couldn't even leave their homes without being spat at, clubbed, or shot in the back, a campaign culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration law that banned a race from entering the United States, after legislators and media characterized the Chinese as "rats," "lepers," but also "machine-like" workers who stole jobs from good white Americans.

A space is overrun when there are too many Asians, and too many can be as few as three.

Minorities, on the other hand, are always judged by their lowest common denominator.

One of the most odious forms of anti-Semitism was precisely this: to complain that Jews aren't sufficiently like other people, and then, the opposite, once they've become almost totally assimilated with their surroundings, to complain that they're just like everybody else, not even a fraction distinguished from the average.

And I was angry because the media took racism seriously - or pretended to - but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.

What if heterosexual male teachers were prejudged as sexual abusers of children, in the way that gay males often have been (which would make more statistical sense, since heterosexual males are the majority of abusers of both girls and boys)?

it was just that prejudiced people linked together things they didn't like.

their appearance was prescribed down to age, height, weight (which was governed by regular weigh-ins), hairstyle, makeup (including a single shade of lipstick), skirt length, and other physical requirements that excluded such things as "a broad nose"—only one of many racist reasons why stewardesses were overwhelmingly white. They had to be single as well as young, and were fired if they married or aged out at over thirty or so.

Certain Americans in western states, having lost their Indians and with few blacks at hand, naturally turned to hating Mexicans

We think that once one has discovered that thirty thousand, let us say, Negroes, Chinese or Puerto Ricans or whatever have syphilis or don't, or are unemployed or not, that we've discovered something about the Negroes, Chinese or Puerto Ricans. But in fact, this is not so. In fact, we've discovered nothing very useful because people cannot be handled in that way.

Some black people who have not heard me interviewed or read my book jump to conclusions and prejudge me... I've been called Uncle Tom. I've been called an Oreo.

I used to go to some Harvard parties with my athlete friends, and they would introduce me as 'Winona, the Indian activist.' It made me uncomfortable. I felt like a novelty.

I think I underestimated the way people bracket you.

When I was younger, you get pigeonholed in parts, which is understandable.

Having had to live through a period of integration into another country a number of years ago, I am keenly aware of the negative implications of stereotyping and the significant efforts required to undo its effects.

That's one of the problems with this country: they put you in a box. You're a Republican, you're a Democrat, you're conservative, you're liberal. And that's really unfair.