Sanjeev Bhaskar Quotes

I'm Asian, so they assumed I'm not an American and that I come from Japan. Restaurants would refuse to serve me, and places would refuse to give you a haircut.

I have had strangers come up to me and attempt to mimic the Chinese language in a derogatory manner. I have been told countless times that I speak 'good' English. I have been asked why someone like me would be interested in watching NFL football. On any given day, if I walk around with a camera, I will be mistaken for a tourist from Asia.

Taking the line of least resistance, we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts and opinions. "The Serbs have massacred…", "The English have devastated…", "The Jews have confiscated…", "The Blacks have torched", "The Arabs refuse…". We blithely express sweeping judgments on whole peoples, calling them "hardworking" and "ingenious", or "lazy", "touchy", "sly", "proud", or "obstinate". And sometimes this ends in bloodshed." – Amin Maalouf "On Identity

Didn't need the user icon to know you're white and male.

I was nearly a teen-ager before I stopped assuming that everyone I met was Jewish.

Or a White Englishman would rather smash a White Frenchman than a Jew! Crazy!

Americans have almost been conditioned to believe that the majority of people who seek to do us harm are those of Muslim descent.

I have this complex that if I walk into a place wearing a colorful shirt someone will stop me and say, 'I'm sorry, but the Latin band comes through the other door.'

I remember people saying: 'You look funny, your hair is so black, you have a flat nose,' but I didn't think of it being racism, and I still don't. But there was a sense of difference, of being an outsider.

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

We are all naturally xenophobic.

We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us.

I know I'm not an anti-Semitic person.

I never suffered anti-Semitic racism because no one thought I was Jewish.

I was surprised by some of my French colleagues who immediately assumed that because I spoke English with an American accent, that, therefore, you must be a supporter of whoever is the current president of the United States. There seems to be this widespread feeling that, 'Oh, American accent - therefore, you like cowboy boots.'

I hope that when people see Asian women, they realize we are all different. A lot of time with Caucasian people, they just group us together as Asian. But even with different cities in China, people have different personalities... We look Asian, but we still look different. We don't look the same.

One always likes to think that other countries are not like one's own.

All Israelis think Arabs steal cars.

From my situation as an African American person in the U.S., people may look at me and think a certain thing without getting to know me. I'm of Nigerian and Caribbean heritage. I went to Yale. What you see is not what you think you're getting.

When you're walking down a street and you are a brown-skinned person or you're a person that lives in an immigrant community, there's no differentiating on - solely on the basis of what you look like. They don't walk down the street saying, hi, I'm an immigrant; I'm here legally or not.

I had kids make fun of me because not only was I blonde but also Polish.

The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.

All Italians are plunderers.

The ***** is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.

The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: the one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.