Benjamin Watson Quotes

Our nation's long neglect of minorities whose skin is dark is perhaps only a little worse than our neglect of another minority whose hair is white.

Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man's wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.

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?

We need more leaders speaking up for minority groups who have been marginalized and attacked.

We need to have a discussion on race, but we also need to have a discussion on how we are treating poor and minority people in this country.

Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that's been discriminated against, knows what it's like.

I don't think I know a single person who's a minority who hasn't experienced some form of discrimination at one time or another.

Racism is a problem everywhere, especially in this country, but all over the world, and especially within queer space.

As a black woman of trans experience, my position in this society leaves me really no choice but to stand for the intersectional identities I hold.

If there was an Oppression Olympics, I would win the gold medal. I'm Palestinian, Muslim, I'm female, I'm disabled, and I live in New Jersey.

I'm a brown-skinned Indian immigrant, low-caste untouchable - I don't know how many labels you want to put on me - who's fought all his life.

Racism is a form of hate. We pass it on to our young people. When we do that, we are robbing children of their innocence.

Only a straight white person would have no concept of what visibility is. They've never contended with anything but visibility.

It's not new to attempt to vilify the minority that speaks about their oppression. That's not a new thing.

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.

Much of what I do now stems from my rage at segregation and discrimination. I can't stand to see children not able to do anything, anybody not able to do what they can do. The daily lessons of exclusion, having hand-me-down books in schools, of seeing ambulances turn away and not give health care for people lying in the streets who are migrant workers. Everything I do today stems from that segregated existence.

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.

Racial prejudice boils down to the deeply anti-American message that some people are born to fail.

For the white man to ask the black man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, 'Do you hate me?' The white man is in no moral position to accuse anyone else of hate! Why, when all of my ancestors are snake-bitten, and I'm snake-bitten, and I warn my children to avoid snakes, what does that snake sound like accusing me of hate-teaching?

It's understandable why a minority that was treated as badly as blacks in this country have been for so long would, when they finally found themselves on top, brag about it and want to shout from the rooftops.

A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere.

Sexism and racism and homophobia and classism are so naturalized. All these stereotypes make people think it's just normal that straight white men are getting all the breaks.

In the West or anywhere else, the treatment of people in an undignified way (structural and institutionalized racism against Latinos or African American citizens) as well as a dangerous dehumanization of some people (in Palestine, Iraq, Africa or Asia) are simply unacceptable.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.