Michael Lewis Quotes

We all have our prejudices, and we may or may not be aware of them. Sometimes people walk by me and give me a wider berth. It happens. I wear hoodies all the time because my head gets cold. Something innocuous can be misunderstood.

I can be standing in Barneys with my coat and purse and my selections, and some white woman will say, 'Can you get this in my size?' What she sees is a black woman, and her service button goes off.

You know, sometimes an interviewer will look at me and say - you're bright! They're actually surprised I might be bright.

We know that we're not supposed to be racially biased, and we don't want to think of ourselves as racially biased, so we tell ourselves a different story.

There are a lot of people who like to think they don't have prejudices and that they're open people, and yet, we all have that in ourselves, oftentimes against people of our own race or our own gender or whatever.

Sometimes an interviewer will look at me and say, 'You're bright!' They're actually surprised I might be bright.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

For decades, scholars have studied the ways in which implicit biases affect how we perceive other people in this multiethnic society of ours. The data consistently shows that about 90 percent of us possess some implicit prejudices - and, unsurprisingly, people typically favor their own group.

Behavior is individual and projecting an individual behavior upon an entire race is a version of racism. Put yourself in someone else's shoes: imagine what it would be like going thru life having this type of projection on you.

The more afraid we are of the shadow of racism, the more conscious we might become of our own unsuspected biases.

This is really honest: I have to remind myself not to look another black man as a threat.

Everyone - male and female - is biased. But no one wants to admit it, so our brains search for examples that disprove the accusation.

No one is ever bias-free, but some people let their biases influence their actions more than others.

When a black man is stopped by a cop for no apparent reason, that is covert racism. When a black woman shops in a fancy store and is followed by security guards, that is covert racism. It is more subtle than 1960s racism, but it is still racism.

I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in America jump to conclusions about each other.

In many cases hate a person is rooted in the involuntary estimate of its virtues.

Where prejudice exists it always discolors our thoughts.

The soft bigotry of low expectations

For instance, if you're a black guy and you got pulled over, and you didn't know that any other black men were being pulled over, you would constantly in the back of your head be thinking, "What did I do?" rather than, "I didn't do anything, these are just the conditions I live under."

There is a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he is African American. There’s no question about that and it’s the kind of thing nobody ever says but everybody’s thinking it.

The way that we make dumb decisions and discriminatory decisions is by employing stereotypes about groups of people. We don't see people as fully human when other people speak for them.

Every one of us is prone to implicit sexual prejudices, including women.

You know that prejudice isn't logical, which is why it is so hard to overcome.

But I've never met a racist yet who thinks he's a racist. That's always the disturbing thing about when we begin to look at ourselves.

When I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women.