George Henry White Quotes

When I stepped into this world, I saw that we were all burdened by a certain kind of indifference to the plight of poor people. We were burdened by an insensitivity to a legacy of racial bias. We were tolerating unfairness and unreliability in a way that burdened me and provoked me.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.

Never mind a world that can't see past brutality.

My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.

I was taught from a young age that many people would treat me as a second-class citizen because I was African-American and because I was female.

We always see abhorrent behavior and say why, but then we get mad when somebody tries to answer.

I try to be outraged by things that other people are just very accepting of, as though they're normal and can't be changed. A lot of what I write about is, 'Hey, you know, this stuff is really awful, and it doesn't need to be, and that's why it's so offensive.' Things should be better.

Commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive, and impolitic.

If they're all so brilliant and I'm such an affirmative-action hire, how come they didn't catch me?

Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.

The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to African-Americans in the Civil Rights era.

Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool.

Millions of Americans, too, face the intolerable fact that because of their race or their color or the way they choose to worship God, they are denied rights which are their birthrights and which, by American principle and law, are their just due.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

There's nothing more unfair than a guy that doesn't have a job.

With what moral authority can they [the U. S.] speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated?

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.

The arguments given by my predecessors in support of the ban on same sex marriage are the same arguments that were given to ban interracial marriage.

No Negro, mulatto, or Indian shall from and after the publication of this act bear any office ecclesiastical, civil or military, or be in any place of public trust or power, within this her majesty's colony and dominion of Virginia

Let us reflect on the obvious but often neglected lesson that state-sanctioned discrimination never looks good in hindsight.

Freedom in America was not always flat. Racism made it un-flat, so that some people had privileges over other people.

It's kind of almost not fair that certain people don't get the opportunities that others get just because of where they are born or where they were brought up.

Inequality is not the same thing as unfairness; and, to my mind, it is the latter that has incited so much political turmoil in the rich world today.

There are people getting screwed in our country every single second, minute, hour of the day. And if by our work, we can decrease that number, we'll make a difference; we'll be doing our jobs.

I run into a lot of ignorance and stupidity. It gets really frustrating, but you have to take yourself out of it and realize what's happening in the bigger picture.