Quotes About Discrimination

For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we've developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don't, it's a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what's at the end of it.

After Clinton, just to get food stamps to buy potatoes and flour, you suddenly had to hand in a detailed financial history dating back years, submit to wholesale invasions of privacy, and give in to a range of humiliating conditions. Meanwhile banks in the 1990s were increasingly encouraged to lend and speculate without filling out any paperwork at all, and eventually borrowers were freed of the burden of even having to show proof of income when

For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we've developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don't, it's a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what's at the end of it.

More and more often, we all make silent calculations about who is entitled to what rights, and who is not.

the major legislative achievements of the eugenics movement included a set of involuntary sterilization laws that targeted not immigrants or people of color, but poor "feebleminded" whites.

how could authorities distinguish between a white person who was merely poor by circumstance and one who was biologically predisposed to poverty, crime, and low social standing?

For poor whites, some of the most pernicious, invidious, and damaging distinctions imposed by eugenicists were those that focused on intelligence and cognitive skills, areas of human ability that these professionals regarded as key to establishing and organizing a just and meritocratic democracy.

Inequality… has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

We had to hate the Irish more than any blacks. They were fighting back against our supposed oppression of them. At every opportunity, the Irish were to be attacked,

Human beings are not built to function in a radically unequal world.

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.

Blacks should be used to play whites. For centuries we had probed their faces, the angles of their bodies, the sounds of their voices, and even their odors. Often our survival had depended on the accurate reading of a white man's chuckle or the disdainful wave of a white woman's hand.

novels, like racists, tend to be the same wherever you turn," writes William Giraldi,

JIM CROW LAWS WERE ENFORCED IN MUCH OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH FROM 1877 TO THE MID-1960S. THESE LOCAL AND STATE LAWS KEPT BLACK PEOPLE AND WHITE PEOPLE SEPARATE.

mind has no sex": there was no limit to what Sophia or any girl might learn. Yet gender did affect the uses of knowledge.

hypocritical laws that made a woman pay for a man's crime. Why should women "receive the punishment due to the vices of so large a portion of the rest"?

The list of the bigots and the list of the fools are always perfectly the same list!

Though the biggest fault of the big man is tolerated easily, the smallest fault of the little man is not endured at all!

You're judging her by her literacy," Tara says. "You're a literacist." "You've made that up.

You're judging her by her literacy,' Tara says. 'You're a literacist.' 'You've made that up.' Thomas Mackee packs up his stuff and stands up. 'You chicks give me the shits,' he says. 'You, on the other hand, brighten up our day,' I tell him. 'We all regard you as a god.

You know what we call you? Bitch Spice, Burtch Spice, Slut Spice and Stupid Spice.' Thomas Mackee says this

Tara's already been called a lesbian because that's how the Sebastian boys deal with any girl who has an opinion.

You're judging her by her literacy,' Tara says. 'You're a literacist.

I mean, the unfair treatment of women and black people and Indians and other groups, that's real. Mistreatment of other people because 'I'm better than you are' is such a sad part of the world.