Quotes About Discrimination

Women are allowed to enter the spaces of the senses, the space of the body, the spaces opened by sensations, all kinds of feelings, but women are not allowed to enter the spaces of reason to the same extent, that is to say the space of ideas, political ideas.

When I was in junior high school I complained to my mother: Mami, ya no quiero llevar tacos de tortilla de marina con arroz, frijoles y carne para lonche porque we rein Las gringas. (Mami, I don't want to take tacos of flour tortillas with rice, beans and meat for lunch because the white girls make fun of me Tacos were nutritious and made with love, care, and hope had to be replaced with sandwiches of baloney and white bread.

The eighteenth-century origins of the "right to bear arms" explicitly excluded Black people.19 South Carolina encoded into law that the enslaved could not "carry or make use of fire-arms or any offensive weapons whatsoever" unless "in the presence of some white person.

Jim Crow dominated the lives of black people in America from 1890 well into the twentieth century. From conception to coffin, there was no nook or cranny of a black person's life that it did not touch.

Even for Detroit's liberal mayor, peace was based on black people quietly and gracefully accepting the fact that they had no right to their rights.

The truth is that when World War I provided the opportunity in the North for blacks to get jobs with unheard-of pay scales and, better yet, the chance for their children to finally have good schools, African Americans fled the oppressive conditions in the South.

The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that as "many as 12 percent of eligible voters nationwide may not have government-issued photo ID," and that "percentage is likely even higher for students, seniors and people of color.

I am not," Lincoln had said, "nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.

Equally vicious was the practice of "whitecapping," which, since the horrors of Bosnia and Srebrenica, we now recognize as ethnic cleansing: In several Georgia and Mississippi counties, where plantations did not dominate the economy, local whites maimed, murdered, and terrorized African Americans and, as the persecuted fled, seized all the land until one could "ride for miles and not see a black face.

Beginning in 1917 and going into the 1920s, so-called race riots, which were essentially lynchings on a grander scale, erupted in East St. Louis, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and numerous other cities.75 Though labeled "riots," these outbursts were more like rampages, where whites went hunting for African Americans to pummel, burn, and torture.

Even as late as 1960, more than 98 percent of Mississippi's black adults were not registered to vote.49

The wholesale slaughter of African Americans in Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), and Ocoee, Florida (1920), resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives simply because whites were enraged that black people had voted.

The states couldn't possibly build two comparable systems. But if they really wanted Jim Crow, the NAACP began to make painfully clear, they would have to pay for it.5

In 1680, as racialized chattel slavery congealed, the legislature crafted a law denying the enslaved and free Blacks the right to self-defense if attacked by their " 'master' and/ or Whites." 18 Next, in 1723, the colony's statute explicitly stated that "no negro, mulatto, or indian [sic] whatsoever" should have a gun "under penalty of a whipping not to exceed twenty-nine lashes.

Right then he had a revelation: "They all hate black people, all of them. They're all afraid, all of them. Great God! That's it! They're all Southern! The whole United States is Southern!"17

In December 1952, Marshall argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth as well as the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.

That would be the "elephant in the room."30 In fact, as H. R. Haldeman, one of the Republican candidate's most trusted aides, later recalled, "He [Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.

Indeed, by 1963, not one black child attended a public school with a white child in South Carolina, Alabama, or Mississippi.

Ronald Reagan breezily shared anecdotes about how Lyndon Johnson's Great Society handed over hard-earned taxpayer dollars to a "slum dweller" to live in posh government-subsidized housing and provided food stamps for one "strapping young buck" to buy steak, while another used the change he received from purchasing an orange to pay for a bottle of vodka. He ridiculed Medicaid recipients as "a faceless mass, waiting for handouts." The

Senator Walter George (D-GA) was proud of how states like his beloved Georgia were able to legally disfranchise millions of voters. "Why apologize or evade?" he asked. "We have been very careful to obey the letter of the Federal Constitution—but we have been very diligent in violating the spirit of such amendments and such statutes as would have a Negro to believe himself the equal of a white man."117

Every state admitted to the Union since 1819, starting with Maine, embedded in their constitutions discrimination against blacks, especially the denial of the right to vote. In addition, only Massachusetts did not exclude African Americans from juries; and many states, from California to Ohio, prohibited blacks from testifying in court against someone who was white.

A broken, treacherous rights landscape, of course, has always been the reality for African Americans.

am not," Lincoln had said, "nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races."29

The whole culture of the white South was erected on the presumption of black inability.