Quotes About Discrimination

Frantically, she reminded herself how many men in Bombay might have fair skin and curly black hair: thousands of Armenians, Anglo-Indians, and Jews. And Cyrus didn't use a cane.

He chuckles at his own joke. No one wants the Jews. Not even America. Americans have no right to criticize us. They rounded up their Indians, you know. Put them on reservations.

The biggest problems we have in this world are because of what we assume about each other. People make decisions based on appearance or gender or race, without getting to know anyone in that group. Or they have a very limited sample. Then they say things and other people hear them and start to believe them. Pretty soon we have a cultural bias that affects all kinds of decisions.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

That being said, one person's "barbarian" is another person's "just doing what everybody else is doing." (How many can be expected to do better than that?) The question is, Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, Whom do we believe we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African-American men (and a few women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America.

protested that a big majority of Black men were drafted compared to whites. It seemed wrong that men who were still struggling for equality at home were being shipped overseas for a cause most people didn't even understand.

Magnus didn't understand the Germans' special hatred for Jewish people. They were just people, after all.

Although she knew her mom was right about kids getting different treatment for doing the same thing

Yet it is true—skin can mean a great deal. Mine means that any man may strike me in a public place and never fear the consequences. It means that my friends do not always like to be seen with me in the street. It means that no matter how many books I read, or languages I master, I will never be anything but a curiosity—like a talking pig or a mathematical horse.

But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.

An anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews.

A bigot can be defined as a guy who gets caught practicing sociology without a license.

The battle rages eternal, though the race, religion, gender or sexual orientation of those discriminated against changes regularly. Maybe man's need for a scapegoat is genetically programmed into him.

Pee-poo are like dis, Rachel had told me once, putting the peachy-pink Crayola that used to be called Flesh into my hand. As if all the flesh that mattered was that color. That crayon was called Peach now, but the ideas behind its old name were still alive and present. Present everywhere, all across the country, but more overt in Birchville. I wouldn't raise Digby

Layoffs were upon us. They had been rumored for months, but now it was official. If you were lucky, you could sue. If you were black, aged, female, Catholic, Jewish, gay, obese, or physically handicapped, at least you had grounds.

as the Links, the Knickerbocker, and the New York Athletic Club continued to exclude Jews from membership.

The world can see what goes on in the tombs of America as Black people are being slowly strangled and suffocated to death. . . .

There's little difference between a lynching by the KKK and a police officer who puts a bullet in the head of a young Black man, and it happens time and time again.

we're a "lower order of people" in one breath we are damned for being "unassailable" and the next there is fear that we'll assimilate. ... If we are educated, the complaint is that we will cease being the "ideal servant".

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

Señora, inspector. Lo de señorita es machista.

It does away with a lot of complaints that 'We Were Also Done Wrong,' from the Irish or other minorities, precisely because it recognizes the fundamental difference. African Americans were kept down by the force of law, not custom, and then every effort to lift the burden of the law was met with denial of due process.

what I call the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Justice is open to everyone in the same way as the Ritz Hotel.