Viola Davis Quotes

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America

We've heard the excuses from those responsible for hiring that they don't want to take a chance on a new director. But the truth is that the industry hires new directors all the time; it's just that most of them are white males.

I still think in this country, and this might surprise you, the one thing that George Bush said as president that I do agree with, I love that phrase, 'the soft bigotry of low expectations.'

I thought the Navy at times resembled a Southern plantation that had somehow escaped the Civil War. Blacks swabbed the decks, shined shoes, did the cooking, washed the dishes, and served the food. Virtually no other jobs were open to them.

You can’t be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval of affirmative action.… We have to prove ourselves and we have to work hard doing it.

One third of African American males are destined to be in prison sometime in their lifetime.

We’re always talking about blacks as a group and whites as individuals.

I think it's worth putting energy into affirmative action in terms of having diversity in positions of power because the door was shut for so long.

I'm guilty of reverse discrimination. I'm white, and people don't think that white fighters are any good.

Unfortunately, oftentimes people hire and give opportunities to people that look like them. They don't realize how much their own internal lives or privilege gets in the way of looking for people outside of the traditional spaces where they always find people.

At the moment we have a ruling class that has one law and the people the other.

There are still traces of discrimination against race and gender, but it's a lot different than when I started out. It just comes quietly, slowly, sometimes so quietly that you don't realize it until you start looking back.

I'm not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class.

If you're African American, you are forced into making different choices, in a lot of cases, than you are as a white person.

I don't know how one would define an affirmative-action hire. I ultimately do not know what role race played in my hiring.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

If someone believes they are limited by their gender, race or background, they will become more limited.

When people rely on surface appearances and false racial stereotypes, rather than in-depth knowledge of others at the level of the heart, mind and spirit, their ability to assess and understand people accurately is compromised.

In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear. Through initiatives like My Brother's Keeper, I'm personally committed to changing both perception and reality.

There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.

We know that in our free market economy some will prosper more than others. What we don't accept is the idea that some folks won't even get a chance.

I heard about the book and I said, 'Oh my god, I've got to read this book,' and I didn't know that a white woman wrote it. Nobody said that to me, they just said, 'The Help - Oh my god, you've got to read it.' Everyone failed to mention it was a white woman, I think, because nobody really wants to talk about race.

Once you open up the Pandora's box of race and gender... you're never done.

I do not believe that the colour of one's skin determines whether you are disadvantaged.

Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.