Quotes About Prejudice

Ah," I said with a bleak smile. "What was a quaint and silly folk belief becomes a major news item when white people believe in it.

I think you should know that real-life white people are not all as funny as the ones on 'Seinfeld'.

On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other's humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.

The glorification of hatred is predicated on a foundation of fear-induced ignorance venomous to haters and those they believe they hate.

Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.

The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else's children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose.

I have never seen to my knowledge a man, woman, or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men.

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy.

I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.

OUr teachers at LT&C had their A levels and the odd teaching certificate. It is astonishing how a black crepe robe worn over a coat or blouse gives a Cockney punter or a Covent Garden flower girl the gravitas of an Oxford don. Accent be damned in Africa, as long as it's foreign and you have the right skin colour.

In all my years here, no one's been able to remember my name when I'm introduced. No one has bothered. They usually see us as types, not as individuals." His

But then my poor sons would have to be educated alongside Anglo-Indians. They'd have a chee-chee accent like their mother and be called 'fifteen annas' behind their backs, even if they were not Anglo-Indians." There were sixteen annas to a rupee, and to be a Celeste was to be one short.

The pulayar are the lowest caste in Travancore, rarely owning their own property, even their huts belonging to the landlord; the sight of them is enough to pollute a Brahmin

group thinks the other is inferior by birth, by skin color, by history. Inferior, and therefore deserving less. My father was no slave. He was beloved here. But he was never your equal so he wasn't rewarded as one.

Modern medicine is not scientific, it is full of prejudice, illogic and susceptible to advertising. Doctors are not taught to reason, they are programmed to believe in whatever their medical schools teach them and the leading doctors tell them. Over the past 20 years the drug companies, with their enormous wealth, have taken medicine over and now control its research, what is taught and the information released to the public.

If Joy Behar or Sherri Shepherd was a dude, they'd be off TV. They're not funny enough for dudes. What if Roseanne Barr was a dude? Think we'd know who she was?

White Louisianians must have been relieved when the mayor banned free men of color from teaching the martial arts to their brethren. In New Orleans, it seems, good fencers did not make good neighbors—especially when they were colored.

Twain wrote in 1869 that "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors. Every White supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, American Indian, and Aboriginal Australian ancestors, as does everyone else, and not just in the sense that humankind is an African species in deep prehistory, but at a minimum from classical times, and probably much more recently. Racial purity is a pure fantasy.

none more so than pigmentation. Racism has many definitions; a simple version is that racism is a prejudice concerning ancestral descent that can result in discriminatory action.

Racism is hateful bullying, and a means of reinforcing self-identity at the expense of others:

The Arab," for comparison, he concludes, "is little more than an eater up of other men's produce; he is a destroyer rather than a creator, and he is unprolific"). Though wince-inducing now, these sorts of views were not necessarily normal and not necessarily uncontroversial then, and we shouldn't assume that these were universal British Victorian values.

Of all the attempts over the centuries to place humans in distinct races, none succeeds.

What we can also say with an arsenal of scientific ammunition is that though skin color is the first and most obvious way we see humans, it's a superficial route to an understanding of human variation, and a very bad way to classify people.