John L. DeWitt Quotes

A Jap’s a Jap. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not. I don’t want any of them ...

I hope that the mistakes made and suffering imposed upon Japanese Americans nearly 60 years ago will not be repeated against Arab Americans whose loyalties are now being called into question.

Now there will be suspicion hatred, and intolerance between those of Japanese ancestry ... and the other natives. There will be divisions among the Japanese Americans themselves, because some are citizens by right of birth while those born in Japan are subjects of the Mikado. The Japanese Americans are overwhelmingly loyal, but they have always borne the burden of white American suspicion, and that burden will increase. Thousands may be penned in camps.

There are in the United States many persons of Japanese extraction whose loyalty to the country, even in the present emergency is unquestioned. It would therefore be a serious mistake to take any action against these people.

A Jap is a Jap. It makes no difference whether the Japanese is theoretically a citizen. He is still a Japanese. Giving him a scrap of paper won't change it.

We now know what we should have known then--not only was that evacuation wrong, but Japanese-Americans were and are loyal Americans.

The treatment of Japanese in America is so grave that it may endanger our international relations and welfare.

After the Pearl Harbor attacks, around 120,000 Japanese Americans were jailed in internment camps. If an attack on U.S. soil were perpetrated by people who were not white and Christian, we can be pretty damn sure that racists would have a field day.

I always get stopped by security and immigration, telling me, 'Tell me who the terrorist is, or we won't stamp your passport!' The last time that somebody did that to me - at LAX, actually - I was like, 'Hey, don't ever ask a brown girl that in an American airport!'

I was in high school after 9/11 happened. I didn't get bullied. I didn't get treated differently, but I definitely felt people looked at me differently.

The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.

I know 100 percent what it's like to have people tell you that you can't hold an office because of your color, and to have people vote based on that belief.

Racism is wrong, racism is very dangerous.

When you have a candidate like Donald Trump saying that Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers, and also doubling down and suggesting that we should deport 11 million undocumented workers, who are mostly people that came to this country to better themselves, and to patrol neighborhoods of predominantly Muslims families. This shows you how deeply held those feelings really are in our country and that the Republicans have absolutely no interest in helping minorities.

Today a racist is synonymous with race hatred. Hating someone is a pretty unpleasant thing and few people are capable of hating others. Long-term hatred is a pathological disorder.

Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich. Color does not necessarily denote quality, content or value. If a black is a tyrant, he is first and foremost a tyrant, then he incidentally is black. Bush is a tyrant and if he gathers around him black tyrants, they all have to be treated as they are being treated.

People see dark faces out there, and the perception is that they're African American. They're not us. They're impostors.

...racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.

racism is alive and doing too well in America.

Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.

I was in Toronto when they had a severe outbreak of SARS - you know, Severe Asian Racism Syndrome. I was in the airport and there were these big snowboarder guys and they had white masks around their necks, and as soon as they saw me, they put their masks on. So I went "cough, cough, cough... You wanna egg rorr?

Imagine Americans who go to Paris. Why would you want to go where someone's going to disparage you? Why would you go anywhere where they treat you bad? Well, that's how it is for us to go to Mexico. You have to be on your guard, because I think the Mexicans are harder on the Mexicans, the Mexican-Americans. They don't see us as Mexican. I think part of it's a class issue and a color issue. We're more connected to their servants, so what are we doing staying at a nice hotel? There's a kind of shame.

Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviors; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why the Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching.

There's racism everywhere.

America is a white man's country.