Quotes About Prejudice

What worried him most was something Dietrich had mentioned observing during his visit to America—the way Americans treated Negroes. Not so different in some ways than German citizens treated Jews at the beginning. If Americans treat our citizens in such a way, will they step up to the plate to protect their own or the world's Jews? He wasn't sure.

Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst

Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature?

Hollywood is still so racist against Asians that when there's a rare Asian extra in a film, I tense up for the chinky joke and relax when there isn't one.

The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem.

As I try to move beyond the stereotypes to express my inner consciousness, it's clear that how i am perceived inheres to who i am.

the curse of anyone nonwhite is that you are so busy arguing what you're not that you never arrive at what you are.

It's as if readers relish white male writers behaving badly but they demand that minority writers must always be good.

Dao was not everyman, because not every man would have been brutalized in that way. In the same way I saw Dao and thought, He is not any man, he is my father, Chicago aviation officers thought, He is not any man, he is a thing. They sized him up as passive, unmasculine, untrustworthy, suspicious, and foreign. Years of accumulated stereotypes unconsciously flickered through their minds

One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children.

I confront the infinite chasm between the audience's conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don't look the part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We're not racial enough to be token. We're so post-racial we're silicon

They think Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.

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.

I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended to or mocked by white adults. This was so customary that when my mother had any encounter with a white adult, I was always hypervigilant, ready to mediate or pull her away. To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you.

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

In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we're being used by whites to keep the black man down.

Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy.

Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.

In her satiric play Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, the playwright Young Jean Lee said: "The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem. It's like going with an inferior brand so that you can afford more luxury features. Also, Asian women will date white guys who no white women would touch.

When I was growing up, black and brown kids were casually racist. Korean kids were casually racist.

Yeah," he said, rolling his eyes. "Because when I think 'game architect' and 'engineering,' I think 'extrovert.

Most feminists view women as a class whose presumed interests are to be given priority and see equality as a matter of convenience: women are as tough and aggressive as men when it comes to fighting wars or fires, but frail and helpless when it comes to domestic violence; as carnal as men when it comes to sexual freedom, but innocent and victimized in any sexual conflict.

Often the women are burned, so that the death can be passed off as an accident. The killer usually becomes a local hero: a man who has done what was necessary to clear his family name.

Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside.