Quotes About Prejudice

We cater to the better class of gentile clientele. We reserve the right to decline service to anyone we deem to be incompatible.

Bobby Bingo had skin like a baked potato. A complete vegetable man, Lou Ann thought

You from out of town?" he asked after a while, eying my car. "No," I said. "I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate." I didn't like his looks.

She was well accustomed to watching Yankee brains grind their gears, attempting to reconcile a hillbilly accent with signs of a serious education.

You know what really gets me?" I asked him. "How people call you 'illegals.' That just pisses me off, I don't know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?

Don't count on it. There's a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people

it's not just girls that end up inside four walls of hate and knuckles for breakfast, it can be anybody. Hate comes along and lays out the damn doormat and there you are.

The world is not at all short on this type of thing, it turns out. All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.

In my time I've learned surprising things about the powers stacked against us before we're born. But the way of my people is to go on using the words they've always given us: Ignorant bastard. Shit happens.

Age-old story, who gets to look down on who, for what reason.

They won't admit to being bigots, so they want him fired for being a communist. Like they even know what a communist is!

His only advice was to be careful in Unicoi because there were folks down there mean enough to hang an elephant. I said okay, thinking it was an expression his people had. But no. They gave the death penalty to an elephant there one time.

These people and vegetarians and so forth that are all about being fair to the races and the gays, I am down with that. I agree. But would it cross any mind to be fair to us? No, it would not. How do I know? TV. The comedy channel is so funny it can make you want to go unlock the gun cabinet and kill yourself. Do they really think that along with being brainless and having sex with animals, we don't even have cable?

was a guy called Copperhead. Supposedly he had the dark skin and light-green eyes of a Melungeon, and red hair that made you look twice.

Because DSS pay is basically the fuck-you peanut butter sandwich type of paycheck. That's what the big world thinks it's worth, to save the white-trash orphans. And if these kids grow up to throw punches at washing machines or each other or even let's say smash a drugstore drive-through window. Crawl in and take what's there. Tell me how you're going to be surprised. There's your peanut butter sandwich back. Every dog gets his day.

I wanted to tell them it's not just girls that end up inside four walls of hate and knuckles for breakfast, it can be anybody. Hate comes along and lays out the damn doormat and there you are. But I kept my mouth shut. It's safer knowing more about people than they know about you.

All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.

but born in the mobile home, so that's like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash.

Recently it has been decided, grudgingly, that dark skin or lameness may not be entirely one's fault, but one still ought to show the good manners to act ashamed.

Anytime you get this many light-skinned black people together at least half of them are going to be folks who act light-skinned.

She wondered how soon after the first baby was born of the rape of a black woman by a white man did some slaver decide that light-skinned slaves were smarter and better by virtue of white blood? And how long after that had some black people decided to take advantage of that myth?

How could he ever be her friend and not understand this very basic part of who she was? Would he have a friend who chose to marry someone who hated people with Down's syndrome? But, of course, white folks in this country are trained to believe they can have it both ways, like stealing the Indian's land while claiming to admire the Noble Savage. "Listen

Curiosity is the best antidote to prejudice... Learn to see all humankind in its maddening, glorious complexity.

Because people are always afraid of what they do not know, what they do not understand, the unfamiliar or the different, and