Quotes About Discrimination

The first time that I ever experienced a microaggression was probably in kindergarten. It's something that starts off from such a young age.

I am an African-American woman of dark skin tone, and there are very specific roles that are usually given to African-American women of a darker hue. Let's start with 'Once on This Island': peasant girl. Let's go to 'The Color Purple': young girl, beaten. Let's go to 'Ragtime': Her baby's taken.

It's difficult for a young girl like me. Because there's a certain time for young actresses, which is like a really juicy period when all the parts are love interests and young heroines. Of course, there's always work for men whatever age they are.

If you're choosing somebody that doesn't have the competence, but because it's a young guy, or it's a lady or if it's a man, it's a positive discrimination and I won't push that.

Like the Negro League players, I traveled through the segregated south as a young man. Because I was black, I was denied service at many restaurants and could only drink from water fountains marked 'Colored.' When I went to the movies, I would have to sit in the Colored balcony.

Public housing officials are free to discriminate against you on the basis of criminal records, including arrest records. And so, you know, what you find is that even for these extremely minor offenses, people find themselves trapped in a permanent second-class status and struggling to survive.

I worked with these liberal elites for 28 years at CBS News, and they were always throwing around the term 'white trash,' by which they meant poor southerners who didn't go to Harvard. I'm not sure why that makes them trash.

The Journey of Reconciliation was organized not only to devise techniques for eliminating Jim Crow in travel, but also as a training ground for similar peaceful projects against discrimination in such major areas as employment and in the armed services.

It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens. We was met in Indianola by policemen, Highway Patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time.

People called me a dude and said there was no way I could be a woman. Some even wanted me to prove it to them. During high school and college, when we traveled for games, people would shout the same things while also using racial epithets and terrible homophobic slurs.

When I travel overseas on many occasions, I get pulled out because I may be buying a one-way ticket, I may be traveling with my sister and we have different last names. That's smart profiling. Just pulling people out one at a time when we have millions of passengers in random screenings I'm not sure is the best way to do it.

I have travelled the globe and experienced racial remarks towards me because I am black, believe me, the list goes on.

So when people used to call me 'chinki' I thought that okay maybe my mother is Chinese so they are calling me that. It was only in my 20s, when I travelled to the north-east that I realised that it was racist and that the north-easterners were called this and they were not considered Indians just because of the way they look.

For any female actor, the age between 35 to 45 is treacherous. Filmmakers tell me, I am at that awkward age. No parts are written for women in this age bracket, while men at that age flourish and have great careers.

We can never completely fulfill the promise of this treasured republic if we are blinded by color.

In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.

Americans, the eyes of the world are upon you. How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do?

I live in Arizona, and I don't like the way they treat Hispanics there.

There is a tendency to want to treat blacks as a monolithic socioeconomic group.

I don't like age barriers. I don't like when people treat you differently when they find out how old you are.

The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling... How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do?

Would it be better if I'd married a Negro woman? Would they treat my child any better? Erect fewer barriers?

If something is as smart as you, do you treat it differently if it isn't a human?

I hate prejudice, discrimination, and snobbishness of any kind - it always reflects on the person judging and not the person being judged. Everyone should be treated equally.