Quotes About Discrimination

If there is any hope that we in America might one day overcome our own history of genocide, slavery, discrimination, and oppression and create a justice system that is truly a source of international pride rather than shame, I suspect Rwanda may have as much to teach us about what is required as any tour of a Norwegian prison.

If waterboarding's OK, why don't we let our police do it to suspects so we can learn what they know? We only seem to waterboard Muslims... Have we waterboarded anyone else?

We have not learned the lessons of 9/11. This wrongful suspicion, racial hatred, and profiling is what I keep seeing.

It makes me sad that our kids are growing up in a country where they are American but, in a sense, have to prove it. They can't just be who they are like everyone else. Who they are is something suspicious, something scary, something misunderstood.

Any effort to create a second class of Americans, I just can't swallow that.

It's a tough pill to swallow being denied something because of my gender. That's not something I can go home and work on and fix.

I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.

Go to the depot here, now, and what will you see? A well-dressed colored lady, with her little children by her side, whom she has brought up intelligently and with refinement, as much so as white children, comes to the cars, and where is she shown to? Into the smoking car, where men are cursing, swearing, spitting on the floor.

I always identified myself as non-Swedish. I was never discriminated against, because I looked Swedish and speak without an accent. But I had an outsider's perspective.

You can get racially abused 10 times before you even reach the football stadium. If you've been confronted every day with something like that, it's hard. This is not about people playing the 'race card.' This is a reality that people like to sweep under the carpet.

Sure, I've felt racism. I think everybody has prejudice. When I was growing up, the dark Mexican kids weren't allowed in the public swimming pool in Dallas. My light-skinned friend got in, and he laughed at us. It didn't seem like a big deal, because we didn't know any different. So I never ran into anything that actually scarred me.

You know, in 1975 I couldn't get a job in New York City because I was American. The kitchens were predominantly run by French, Swiss, German, and basically I got laughed at. I had education, I had experience, but got laughed at because I was American.

Shortly after the appointment of Britain's first-ever female police constable with officials powers of arrest, the Home Office declared that women could not be sworn in as police officers because they were not deemed 'proper persons'. It makes you wonder what those Home Office officials would say now to having a female Home Secretary.

Everywhere in TV and films, actors who become mothers are treated differently. Suddenly, people will be like, 'Oh, she's a mom, so she can't play a sex symbol role.'

When I grew up, you needed to have straight hair. It's symbolic of needing to be like everyone else, needing to look like everyone else. And what that meant was looking like the dominant ruling class in America.

To be sympathetic without discrimination is so very debilitating.

Having a baby is a disaster for your career. I don't think there's any sympathy.

When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.

Racism is just the symptom, but the fight is economic.

The majority of Jews are secular... the Nazis never checked if anyone was going to the synagogue or eating kosher.

Our political establishment refuses to use the word 'segregated.' They call the schools diverse, which means half black, half Hispanic, and maybe two white kids and three Asians. 'Diverse' has become a synonym for 'segregated.'

In 1932, the predecessor organization, the CDC, took 299 black sharecroppers from the South who had syphilis. They offered them free healthcare, hot lunches, and free burial. They said you can only come to us for healthcare. These were men who were sharecroppers, and they had syphilis. They were never told they had syphilis.

Education is the key to abolishing caste system.

Segregation has no place in the education system.