Quotes About Discrimination

Since most law-abiding citizens had no contact with the parole system, it was not a priority with the state legislatures. And since most of the state's prisoners were either poor or black, and unable to use the system to their advantage, it was easy to hit them with harsh sentences and keep them locked up. But for an inmate with a few connections and some cash, the parole system was a marvelous labyrinth of contradictory laws that allowed the Parole Board to pass out favors.

At eleven-fifteen it rang again, and Jake received his first death threat, anonymous of course. He was called a nigger-loving son of a bitch, one who would not live if the nigger walked.

We like to say that skin color doesn't matter, but that's not always true. We often use it to open doors.

Golf Club description:] Once it had enough members to sustain itself, it began the obligatory practice of excluding others.

Between 1818 and 1940, the state hanged eight hundred people, 80 percent of whom were black. Those, of course, were the judicial hangings for rapists and murderers who had been processed through the courts. During that same period of time, approximately six hundred black men were lynched by mobs operating outside the legal system and thoroughly immune from any of its repercussions

There had been so many. He had hired young ones because they were more plentiful and worked cheaper. The better of those got married and pregnant and wanted six months off. The bad ones flirted, wore tight miniskirts, and made suggestive comments. He had hired more mature women to negate any physical temptation, but, as a rule, they had been bossy, maternal, menopausal, and they had more doctors' appointments, as well as aches and pains to talk about and funerals to attend.

The (bar) will tolerate a few Mexicans but a black face would start a riot. Not that there's anything to worry about. Such a cracker dive has zero appeal to any sensible black guy.

segregated schools

Let them be fierce with you who have no experience of the difficulty with which error is discriminated from truth, and the way of life is found amid the illusions of the world.

Whatever you may have thought about Hillary Clinton, my daughter watched as a highly experienced and qualified woman lost a job to a neophyte dilettante cartoon character of a white man who openly bragged of molesting women. My daughter isn't dumb. She got the message.

Newspapers play up as sensational every attempt by a Negro to rape a white woman. Yet this white rape of Negro women is apparently a different matter. But it is rape nonetheless, and practiced on a scale that dwarfs the Negro's defaults. The

Our experience with the Nazis had shown one thing: where racism is practiced, it damages the whole community, not just the victim group. Were we racists or were we not? That was the important thing to discover.

I learned a strange thing... that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word nigger leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it and it always stings. And always it casts the person using it into a category of brute ignorance. I thought with some amusement that if these two women only knew what they were revealing about themselves to every Negro on that bus, they would have been outraged.

In Black Like Me, I tried to establish one simple fact, which was to reveal the insanity of a situation where a man is judged by his skin color, by his philosophical "accident" - rather than by who he is in his humanity.

The same principle held in black universities, where students demanded more and more black teachers. White professors who had virtually dedicated their lives and their academic careers as historians, anthropologists, sociologists, to the problems of racism and its cures, thinking they did this for the good of the oppressed victims of racism (and often suffering social and academic insults as a result), were asked to leave schools in favor of black teachers. Some of them turned very bitter.

The vast difference between what this country was saying and apparently believing, and what the black man was experiencing, was embittering.

The core concept in Griffin's writings about racism—that members of dominant groups tend to view minorities, because they seem different in some extrinsic way, as intrinsically other, and "as merely underdeveloped versions of their own imprisoning culture"—was intuited in Black Like Me and articulated in a seminal essay, "The Intrinsic Other

I knew, and every black man there knew, that I, as a man now white once again, could say the things that needed saying but would be rejected if black men said them.

Racists are not the pipe-smoking type, I thought to myself.

My revulsion turned to grief that my own people could give the hate stare, could shrivel men's souls, could deprive humans of rights they unhesitatingly accord their livestock. I

They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can't deserve our rights." Others

Some wanted to know where they could find girls, wanted us to get Negro girls for them. We learned to spot these from the moment they sat down, for they were immediately friendly and treated us with the warmth and courtesy of equals. I mentioned this to Sterling. Yeah, when they want to sin, they're very democratic, he said.

If we could only put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustice of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice.

It's a vicious cycle, Mr. Griffin, and I don't know how we'll get out of it. They put us low and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low we can't deserve our rights.