Quotes About Discrimination

Who was I kidding? I'm a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I'm not Rudolf Hess, P. W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I'm a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe.

Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

The black man was expected to follow the dictates of Sol and the white masters. Good Negro communists were to be unquestioning Negro communists, who sat quietly and did as they were told. A good black communist listened to the white communist—his comradely master. For all their bluster about elevating blacks, this was how communists treated their African-American brothers.

How come the white male politicians who vote against affirmative action are always so willing to accept a handicap on the golf course?

In Canada, women's rights are a vital part of our effort to build a society of real equality - not just for some, but for all Canadians. A society in which women no longer encounter discrimination nor are shut out from opportunities open to others.

Apparently long hair was enough to make you a faggot in Chicago in '68.

Whoever dismisses bigotry or underestimates its impact has never lived under the pain.

When I imitate middle-class white speech, I see a flicker of unease cross the faces of the white people in the audience. Then, when I go into ghetto riff, the smiles return. They're fine as long as I am making fun of the same kind of people they make fun of, chinks and spics and niggers. But as soon as I start talking about them, I can clear a room.

This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America

nearly 100 years have passed since the struggle to abolish Negro slavery was won—yet today the Negro people here are still fighting to win true freedom and equality. In hundreds of laws we are branded as inferior, set apart, humiliated.

The best football player in America could not serve as captain of his team. But Paul expressed neither surprise nor anger: by now he knew this was the way the white world operated, and he was able to shrug it off.

Class, she reminded herself, was the real marker in America.

Do you even know what gay stands for? Well, let me tell you. G-A-Y. Got Aids yet?

Your country is ridden with class prejudices.

Government studies show that there are still more than two million race-based housing discrimination crimes every year.8

Added to residential segregation was the powerlessness of blacks to keep vice out of their communities.

When I first left university, I thought about going into the private sector. But I discovered when I went to interview that I could only have a career in the back office, or doing HR. The attitude was, 'My dear lady, you cannot possibly think about going on the board.'

Paulo represented for those of us who are committed to imagine a world, in his own words, that is less ugly, more beautiful, less discriminatory, more democratic, less dehumanizing, and more humane.

Language is being used to make social inequality invisible.

Although one cannot reduce everything to class, class remains an important factor in our understanding of multiple forms of oppression.

In many ways, racial segregation in America has worsened since King's death. National progress has been stalled, indeed reversed, by local, state, and federal policies—from gentrification and zoning laws to tax codes

Astrology is a cousin of racism.

Ageism is the racism of the gay world. We really believe that age—and all of our fears that it carries—will "rub off" on us, the way that racists once believed blackness would.

We lock up the mentally ill because they terrify us. We are afraid of them and even more frightened of what they symbolize. We want to believe they did something that