Gloria Steinem Quotes

If you're anything other than a white, cisgender, able-bodied dude, people are going to project narratives, imagery, and context onto you that you might not necessarily see for yourself.

I'm not tied to the news cycle. I can do an episode on cultural appropriation, not on Rachel Dolezal. We might make a joke about her, but that's not going to be the focus of the conversation.

I really wanted to be born a woman. It all started there. A South American woman. And I'm upset that I was born a white Jewish male. I've been angry since.

Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

I'm not a big fan of identity politics and sort of picking one thing and defining yourself with it.

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.

Race affects everything that I do, and everything that I create speaks to intersectionality.

A lot of people think that intersectionality is only about identity. But it's also about how race and gender are structured in particular workforces.

The further away you get from being a straight white man, the less freedoms you have to figure out who you are and negotiate what you mean to society.

The perpetuation of family and cultural pressures to conform to prescribed masculine behaviors is what creates social isolation and distress in many young gay and trans people of color.

When people think what is the most simple sort of human, it's a white man, and anything else that is added to that complicates it for people. It comes with all kinds of meanings and connotations. If they have a different skin color, that comes with a connotation. If they're a woman, 'Oh well, what do I feel about that?'

Because I was assigned female at birth and I am light-skinned, white, I think people hear my message more than they hear it from someone who was assigned male at birth and is a person of colour.

For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.

People often ask how I can reject the phrase 'woman writer' and not reject the phrase 'Jewish writer' - a preposterous question. 'Jewish' is a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, and 'woman' is a category of anatomy and physiology.

I've been lucky-my looks haven't put me into one category. I don't look like a blue blood. I don't look like a criminal. I don't look like anything.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

I'm not a fan of identity politics.

The industry is quite chauvinistic generally. Expectations of women, girls, what they should look like, how they should be, what they should say, what they should wear, how their hair should be, what colour their skin should be.

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

I don't want to be limited or ghettoized in any way.

I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.

A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.