Quotes About Prejudice

If you look good, you can act in a Bollywood movie, you don't have to be able to act; and Aishwarya Rai is a great example of this. She is a beautiful woman... You look at her, I want to look at her. Damn, she is fine; but stop acting or stop trying to act.

People talk about me being a firefighter, but I have also been very successful. It annoys me that in this country you get pigeon-holed for certain things.

African-Americans know about racism, but I don't think we really know the causes. I decided it's first of all a family problem.

The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.

Some of my contemporaries don't want to talk about the female problem because they feel like whenever they get a teaching position or an award, we are just being pinpointed, fitting into the model.

When I go through the airport and see white women walking through the airport barefooted, like athlete's feet don't exist, there's something wrong.

As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.

I don't think people in America understand race, and how deep the hooks of whiteness there are in our consciousness.

We know that all interracial groups in South Africa are relationships in which whites are superior, blacks inferior. So as a prelude, whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior.

You may call me a Klansman if you will, but, potentially, every white man is a Klansman, as far as the Negro in competition with whites socially, economically and politically is concerned, and there is no use lying.

No one had ever told me that whites were supposed to sing one kind of music and blacks another - I sang what I liked in the only voice I had.

Men continue to misinterpret the second-rate status of women as implying a privileged status for themselves; heterosexuals think the same way about homosexuals; gentiles about Jews; whites about blacks; haves about have-nots.

Liberal whites are the greatest enemy of African Americans.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

For complicated historical and political reasons, we associate 'poor' in our public consciousness with 'black.' Terms such as 'welfare queen' and 'culture of poverty' became associated uniquely with the social maladies of African Americans in urban ghettos, despite the fact that poor whites outnumbered poor blacks.

Whites would rather not be involved in race matters, I think.

As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.

It's an unfortunate fact that in the male black population, a very significant percentage of them, more so than whites or other minority candidates, because of convictions, prison records, are never going to be hired by a police department. That's a reality. That's not a byproduct of stop-and-frisk.

We've begun to put fear into those whites who think they can do anything they want to a black person and get away with it.

I am not naive, and I do realize that racism is alive and well in the United States of America. I am also fully aware that when segregation ended, we didn't all live happily ever after. No one can convince me, however, that life in America would be better if blacks and whites had stayed separate and unequal.

I came across few whites as a boy at Qunu. The local magistrate, of course, was white, as was the nearest shopkeeper. Occasionally, white travelers or policemen passed through our area. These whites appeared as grand as gods to me, and I was aware that they were to be treated with a mixture of fear and respect.

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.

Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.

I think the most harmful belief passed on to me - not always directly - was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up.