Quotes About Prejudice

What's more, the North's unflattering genealogy began in the "bogs and fens" of Ireland and England, where they were spawned from vagabond stock and swamp people.

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

1929, with his appearance in the movie Hearts in Dixie, the very visible African American actor known as Stepin Fetchit began a film career in which he popularized for an entire generation the crude stereotype of laziness suggested by his on-screen name.

How could educated Americans have denied the effect of such persistent prejudice in distorting the southern class system? The reason is actually rather obvious: a fear of unleashing genuine class upheaval

What can be more false and heartless," Adams logged in his diary, "than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?

Lyndon Johnson knew this when he quipped, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." We are a country that imagines

A North Carolina journalist neatly summed up the identity confusion: "If you think you're a redneck, you think you're hardworking, fun-loving, and independent. If you don't think you're a redneck, you think they're loud, obnoxious, bigoted, and shallow.

North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony.

Populated by what many dismissed as "useless lubbers" (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony

waste people," and later "white trash," marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children

critics charged that poor whites had fallen below African slaves on the scale of humanity. They marked an evolutionary decline, and they foretold a dire future for the Old South.

No races, few permitted variant alleles. Anything else arouses hostility

There have always been haters, Stewart. Hate Jews, hate Blacks, hate immigrants, hate Yagaiists who have more initiative and dignity than you do. I'm just the latest object of hatred. It's not new, it's not remarkable. It doesn't mean any basic kind of schism between the Sleepless and Sleepers.

While we might believe that pretty is as pretty does, on some level we want to see youth and beauty as signs of goodness, of innocence. The attractive woman is given a pass. The ugly one gets the chair.

To some "housewife" has become a dirty word.

Men expected idiotic chatter from pretty women, so she had incorporated it into her routine.

Trevor was young, at least five years younger than she was. Between an older man and a younger woman, this would seem like nothing, but it was different this way around. She didn't kid herself. She knew what men were like. They'd go to bed with almost anyone female.

diversity can result in a more rigorous intellectual outcome by fostering critical interrogations that reveal embedded social prejudice.

You won't find me in a romantic comedy. Those movies don't speak to me. People don't come to talk to me about those scripts, because they probably think I'm this dark, twisted, miserable person.

I am for the whites because I am white; I have no other reason, and that one is good.

It is an unfortunate truth of our society that whatever heights a man might scale, his caste is never cast off; it remains an inseparable part of his identity. His caste always remains a cause for scorn or contempt. Only the type of humiliation changes.

I had to admit he looked nice. He has very regular features and straight teeth. I'd just read that even, regular features are universally recognized as beautiful. So no matter what I think of Brooks as a person, I'm genetically programmed to find him attractive. I resent that.

Racism is predictable. It's predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you, people of other races.

Writing in the context of racial prejudice—as one who marched with Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s—Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel argued that prejudice is atheism, "a treacherous denial of the existence of God." In other words, prejudice negates any pretence of trying to believe in a God who claims to have made all people in His image. Heschel continues, "Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol.