Quotes About Discrimination

Unless young blacks are brought into the mainstream of economic life, they will continue to be on the curbstone.

I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.

If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

In all the relations of life and death, we are met by the color line.

I have lived my life in a culture that hates fat people.

America doesn't reward people of my age, either in day-to-day life or for their performances.

For just once in my life, I'd like to get through a whole week without having to deal with some fool, white or black, who's got an attitude about the way I look.

It seems a universal rule in this world that people will always look for victims and scapegoats, does it not? Especially at times of difficulty and tension.

SOmetimes life isn't fair, and straight people are straight up crazy.

I, though less optimistic, had supposed that knowledge would bring understanding. We had not realized that what the public loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it

It was like a disease, and these children whom I loved without caring about their skins or their backgrounds, they were tainted with the hateful virus which attacked their vision, distorting everything that was not white or English.

am a Negro, and what had happened to me at that interview constituted, to my mind, a betrayal of faith. I had believed in freedom, in the freedom to live in the kind of dwelling I wanted, providing I was able and willing to pay the price; and in the freedom to work at the kind of profession for which I was qualified, without reference to my racial or religious origins.

realized at that moment that I was British, but evidently not a Briton, and that fine differentiation was now very important; I

He further advised me to live like a man, with dignity and not let the colour of my skin cripple my spiritual growth or social consciousness. And he told me then that our shoutings against prejudice and discrimination would be empty and meaningless until, inside ourselves, we admitted no difference between men, any men, based on the colour of their skins.

To separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone…. We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place.

To separate children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.

All provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting discrimination in public education must yield.

Color," as he wrote in 1963, "is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.

The United States has always been shadowed by practices that contradict our most cherished principles. The genocide of native peoples, slavery, racial apartheid, Japanese internment camps, and the subordination of women reveal that our basic creed that "all men are created equal" was a lie, at least in practice.

the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by

black people are essentially inferior, less human than white people, and therefore deserving of their particular station in American life.

There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt,

by black people who they believe don't belong in their space.