Quotes About Discrimination

Thanks in part to the commission, Kennedy issued an executive order ending sex discrimination in the federal civil service. In 1963 he signed an Equal Pay Act that guaranteed women equal pay for equal work.

Socially, segregation labeled African Americans as less than human; the term "boy" itself, applied to the Scottsboro defendants even as they became elderly, implied that they were less than men.

When textbooks make racism invisible in American history, they obstruct our already poor ability to see it in the present.

To summarize, waves of ethnic cleansing swept across the United States between about 1890 and 1940, leaving thousands of sundown towns in their wake. Thousands of sundown suburbs formed even later, some as late as the 1960s. As recently as the 1970s, elite suburbs like Edina, Minnesota, would openly turn away Jewish and black would-be home buyers. Some towns and suburbs were still sundown when this book went to press in 2005.

Our culture teaches us to locate overt racism long ago (in the nineteenth century) or far away (in the South) or to marginalize it as the work of a few crazed deviants who carried out their violent works under cover of darkness.

Sundown town police forces, in addition to being all-white, may still be viewed by themselves and other residents as a city's first line of defense against black interlopers. As a result, they engage in DWB ("Driving While Black") policing, targeting black motorists for minor infractions like failing to signal turns.

White mobs killed African Americans across the United States. Some of these events, like the 1919 Chicago riot, are well-known. Others, such as the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than seventy-five people and destroying more than eleven hundred homes, have completely vanished from our history books.

Garrett County is hardly colder than Detroit -- hardly colder in 2002, for that matter, when I had the conversation, than it had been in 1890, when it had 185 African Americans. The fact that the very next county to the east had more than 1,000 African Americans, while Garrett County had at most one black household, is a dead giveaway. Such abrupt disparities can only result from different racial policies, not from factors such as climate.

Many sundown towns had not a single black household as late as the 2000 census, and some still openly exclude to this day.

loan guarantees by the FHA and Veterans Administration (VA) were the most important single cause of postwar suburbanization, and more than 98% of the millions of home loans guaranteed by the FHA and VA after World War II were available only to whites.

African Americans helped build Hoover Dam but had to commute from Las Vegas to do it, while white workers and their families lived in Boulder City, a sundown town built just for them. African Americans helped build Kentucky Dam, but after they finished, their housing—"Negro Village"—was razed, they were booted out, and Marshall County, Kentucky, resumed being a sundown county.

Recovering the memory of the increasing oppression of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the role racism has played in our society and continues to play today.

In June 1906, the city council of Santa Ana, California, passed a resolution that called for the fire department to burn each and every one of the said buildings known as Chinatown; on June 26 a crowd of more than a thousand watched it burn.

From Myakka City, Florida, to Kennewick, Washington, the nation is dotted with thousands of all-white towns that are (or were until recently) all white on purpose.

As Ellis Cose famously raged: I have done everything I was supposed to do. I have stayed out of trouble with the law, gone to the right schools, and worked myself nearly to death. What more do they want? Why in God's name won't they accept me as a full human being?

What else do we know about a person when we know his or her score on the F scale? Research utilizing the F scale suggests people who are high on authoritarianism do not simply dislike Jews or dislike blacks, but, rather, show a consistently high degree of prejudice against all minority groups (including, recent studies indicate, AIDS patients). Any selection of a particular hate target is guided by convenience and social convention.

We first answer these questions by saying that schools should not discriminate against gifted kids.

In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.

I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.

Where any one body of educated men, of whatever denomination, are condemned indiscriminately, there must be a deficiency of information, (or smiling) of something else.

Everyone knew that women had not the capacity for abstract thought; in this, as in so much, men dictated and women followed.

A strong leader is considered a wrong leader when that leader is female.

In my father's scheme of things, there were Italians and then there was the rest of the world.

I don't think I'm especially homophobic, but I draw the line at Batman.