Quotes About Discrimination

I've had many incidents in my life of racism. I've been thrown on the ground. I've been frisked. I've been arrested so many times I couldn't tell you. I have no need to talk about it.

Once upon a time, I was morbidly sensitive about the impertinence born of sociology. Taxi drivers would not stop for me after dark; white girls jogged to keep ahead of my shadow thrown at their heels by the amber street lamps. Part of me didn't blame them, but most of me was hurt.

I got thrown out of music school for even listening to Fats Domino and Ray Charles. I was asked, 'What kind of music do you like to listen to?' and I said, 'Well, I do like Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky but I also like Fats Domino and Ray Charles,' and they literally said, 'Either forget about that or leave.'

That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.

But we are not going to stand by and go back to allowing people with preexisting conditions to be discriminated against, go back to the situation where people can be thrown off their insurance simply because they become seriously ill or you can't get on your parents' insurance after the age of 20.

To have drunkards, idiots, horse-racing, rumselling rowdies, ignorant foreigners, and silly boys fully recognized, while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens, it is too grossly insulting to... be longer quietly submitted to.

I found there's a fairly blatant racism in America that's already there, and I don't think I noticed it when I lived here as a kid. But when I went back to South Africa, and then it's sort of thrust in your face, and then came back here - I just see it everywhere.

Everybody thinks I'm a thug or something like that.

A lot of people think I'm just an athletic thug.

There's a basic rule of thumb that the more a culture oppresses women, or oppresses anyone, the more culturally preoccupied they are with that.

Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one another.

You sit men and women down and give them a maths test, and they will do fairly equally. Then you set up the same test, but with different people, and make them tick a box to say whether they are a man or a woman, and the women do significantly worse in the maths test than they did previously in a group set.

Every now and then I'm in a situation where someone doesn't recognize me, and I experience racism. Things like not being buzzed into a store or sitting in first class on a plane and having someone ask to see my ticket four times.

You know how I know I'm white? I can cry myself out of a parking ticket.

I'm carded for R-rated movies. And I get talked down to a lot. When I try to go rent a car or buy an airplane ticket or other stuff adults do, I get 'Okaaaaaay, honey.' I remember when I was 18, getting crayons in a restaurant.

I think anti-Semitism is the meal ticket of the organizations that fight it.

Some ticket buyers think they don't like Jews.

A lot of African Americans, especially men, deal with this as a part of life. I've been pulled over by the police in my life, and I think I've only gotten a ticket once. It's just a part of everyday life, and it doesn't matter if you're in the car with your children or by yourself.

We treat Black and brown kids who can't vote yet, can't join the military, can't rent a car or even buy a lottery ticket - like adults in our criminal legal system. We deprive them of their joy and their youth. Children who deserve to live rich and abundant lives.

One of the things that really does annoy me is just comments on my hair. Like 'your hair's not tidy,' or 'Ooh, what's this?' Just little comments that I just think are so inappropriate. Sometimes I'm just like, 'Is it really necessary?' But you know, as a black female, you do learn to just brush these things off, which isn't the way it should be.

Every time I am on air, I will receive actually quite a few messages that specifically tie me to the Chinese Communist Party - which is ludicrous because my family left on political asylum from China - or that will blame me and 'my people' for the coronavirus.

Because homophobia is still largely driven by the church, it's legitimised. It's also tied to sexism, because those two are never far apart.

Human beings around the world have to be taught to go, 'Tamil equals Tamil civilians first, and the Tamil Tiger is a separate thing.' And both of those groups are different. It's like a square and a circle.

People might call me the white man, but no one treated me as one.