Cornel West Quotes

Demonizing the other does not help our cause and does bad things to us.

When you have demonization of a group of people, it's easy to clump them all together and not understand them.

Demonization of people on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, or other criteria leads to dehumanization. The notion that some are 'other' is a dangerous and slippery slope.

You see, that's the problem I have with 'you people.'

At North Hollywood High School, I was shunned by everyone. I would sit down in the cafeteria, and students would get up from the table and walk away. They thought I was from the Mafia.

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

If you are socially isolated, you are more vulnerable to stereotypes and myths; you won't have the opportunity to have conversations with someone who has a different social background than you.

Now when I enter a carriage, it almost empties. But there's always one brave enough to stay.

Most of us, if we're not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.

I was sometimes called 'coconut' when I was at school.

An agent said he didn't know what to do with me, I wouldn't be able to play any parts but lesbians and aliens.

I think, we all learned that when we are afraid it's easy to want to blame, and the people we want to blame are the people who don't look like us.

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.

It is almost impossible to convince people who are under the influence of ideological bigotry that whose whom they regard as belonging to the enemy species are human.

Othering people is something that humans have done for ever.

If we can look at another human being and categorise them as 'illegal,' or that chilling American word 'alien,' then what has become of our own humanity?

I was always different from people. Especially being from Kentucky, I always got made fun of.

People are so quick to demonize and stereotype those on the other side that they often say that it's impossible to work with people on the other side.

I remember once at the end of a BBC job interview the manager said to me: 'I didn't realise people like you were clever.' I don't think he was being intentionally nasty. At that time in the BBC he was surrounded by clones of himself, give or take some facial hair and glasses.

As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. ... Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl.

People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.

Life is easier when you can write off others as monsters, demon, as horrible threats that must be hated and feared the thing is you can't do that without becoming them, just a little.

I think it's fair to say there is a demagogic path that Europeans, South Americans, Asians have pursued, and we know where that leads. It uses xenophobia, it uses paranoia, it uses prejudice, it uses nationalism to really stir people up and to, you know, begin an us-versus-them contrast, which is dangerous and is not something we've had in our politics at a presidential level in America.

I think sometimes feeling that you've been marginalized opens you up to the realization that, in their own lives, almost everyone experiences marginalization, a kind of foreigner sense.

I think that "Arabs coming out in droves" is so violative Jewish values that non-Jews admire so much about Jewish people throughout history, of welcoming the stranger, of standing up for the outsider, of defending the marginalized. This was classic us against them. This was the narrowest and meanest of politics, to which Jews, sadly and tragically, around the world have been subjected to.