Randi Weingarten Quotes

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

It's funny how people who ain't never been down there can think that America is so fair and that we should be alright. It's funny that the people who have their foot on our neck are telling us, 'Get up. What's wrong with you?'

You complain that Negroes are a base class. Who makes and keeps the Jew or the Negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the rights which others enjoy?

I was 5 when I got the speech about how I would have to work harder and longer than everyone else because I was brown.

Basically, the system works to my disadvantage for no other reason than that I am a person of color, and I am telling stories about people of color.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

Being born, especially being born a person of color, is a political act in itself.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

We don't have as much prejudice as we did 40 years ago, but today it is more educated.

All the grand work was laid for people who came after me. The Supreme Court decided not to give it to me, so they gave it to two white guys. I think that's what they were waiting for.

When someone lives as a minority, they experience the world differently than those of us who live in the majority. We may occupy the same physical space, but we don't occupy the same psychic space.

I have never been able to discover anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient - in America.

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

Society as a whole had sentenced me to a life of humiliation for the sole reason that I was not white.

I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.

Different identity groups hold specific levels of power over others when their battles play out in the media. To wit: Black beats white. Gay beats white. Black beats gay.

I'm black. I'm gay. I'm culturally Christian. I am a walking target on so many levels, and it is horrifying and a cross that very, very many of us who look like me have to bear.

That is just the reality of being a marginalized person in this country: you have to deal with the psychological impact of your oppressor - whether that's being a woman dealing with men or gay people dealing with straight people or trans people dealing with everybody else.

I have to battle so many issues, and the biggest is racism.

Because I was assigned female at birth and I am light-skinned, white, I think people hear my message more than they hear it from someone who was assigned male at birth and is a person of colour.

Whatever a 'superior' group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an 'inferior' group has will be used to justify its plight. Black men were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'stronger' than white men, while all women were relegated to poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'weaker.

Who makes and keeps the Jew or the Negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the rights which others enjoy?

What people don't know about oppression is that the oppressor works much harder. You always grew up being told you were not smart enough or not fast enough, but we all lived from the time we were children to beat the system.

When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.

I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you.