Quotes About Prejudice

I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were 'German dogs.' They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds.

During World War II, law-abiding Japanese-American citizens were herded into remote internment camps, losing their jobs, businesses and social standing, while an all-Japanese-American division fought heroically in Europe.

I could never understand how we could put 120,000 Japanese behind a fence in World War II. I remember being bewildered about that.

The United States has tried for years to live down President Franklin D. Roosevelt's order during World War II to move Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to inland detention camps on grounds that they might be disloyal.

The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias.

Being a black male in the Deep South after World War II, you could actually come home in your uniform and be lynched on the spot or be connected to some horses and buggies and dragged on the street in front of your wife and children.

In Europe, more than in the United States, worldly people, faced with my Indian skin, reflexively laud my 'ancient,' 'beautiful' origins, which is heartier praise than Cleveland usually gets from Europeans.

There are two worlds out there - two Americas out there. If you're a white person, there's one way of being a citizen in our country, and if you're a brown or a black body, there's another way of being a citizen, and that way is very close to death. It's very close to the loss of your life.

After spending over 15 years reporting in these worlds and getting to meet these traffickers, drug dealers, and other people that are really stereotyped in our society, I've come to realize the uncomfortable truth that most are not very different from us.

What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense.

Western civilization, Christianity, decency are struggling for their very lives. In this worldwide civil war, race prejudice is our most dangerous enemy, for it is a disease at the very root of our democratic life.

It's no one's fault to be born ugly, but, honestly, must it be worn as a symbol of pride?

A hoodie is worn by everybody: kids, white men, white women, black men. But it clings to the black body as a sign of criminality like nothing else.

Directors are not worried about casting beautiful women, but they are not sure that they want to cast great-looking men. My looks have prevented people from seeing my work.

When I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

I was worried that in London I would be judged for who I know rather than what I do. In New York, I am known for fashion.

While I was boxing professionally, I never thought about my looks. The furthest thing from my mind was 'messing up my pretty face' when I was on my way to the ring to meet my opponent. Yet, people I'd meet along the way would always ask me if I was worried about my looks. Then they would go on to say that I was 'too pretty to box.'

In the years when HIV was a killer, any parent of an openly gay person was terrified. I knew my mother well enough that she would spend every day praying that I didn't come across that virus. She'd have worried like that.

I have been pulled over, and I have actually worried, 'Is something going to happen to me even though I am a law abiding citizen?' That is a real fear and is something that we have to come to grips with.

If it's hard for Blue America to see Red America as anything other than a bunch of dumb, racist rednecks; it's hard for Red America to recognize that many minorities are legitimately worried about what a Trump presidency means for their family.

I'm worried about being pigeonholed as an artist, especially a female one, but I think, essentially, it's the music which people judge you by.

What worries me is that 'post-racial' America is not that different from the Americas that have preceded us, and it might not ever be.

It worries me that western journalists, especially British ones, call everyone they don't like 'marginal.'

Most of us don't have to worry about being shot if we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.