Jose Antonio Vargas Quotes

When you dehumanize a group, there's lasting consequences because they know that they're being dehumanized.

Prejudice is a disease. And when they come for you, or refuse your worth, I will be ready for their stones. I belong to you.

People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman.

People see dark faces out there, and the perception is that they're African American. They're not us. They're impostors.

People think because I'm shaped this way, I'm scandalous

You're never going to get beyond other people's preconceptions of what you are and what you're about.

These days I find myself wanting to avoid being pigeon-holed, ghettoized, held in a different category than other authors. And when people ask me if I'm a black writer, or just a writer who happens to be black, I tend to say that it's either a dumb question or a question which happens to be dumb.

Since these early days, I have seen and have experienced many types of discrimination and all of them were rooted in the fear of people that were different than the majority.

I don't get this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired.

There's no such thing as reverse racism.

Italians are a riffraff of desperate scoundrels, ex-convicts and jailbirds.

From a moral point of view, it is wrong... to smear or stereotype minority communities, to pretend or give credence to the idea that the actions of a minority within a community are somehow representative or the fault of the majority of members of that community. That is the very definition of bigotry.

I think people feel like other people are very different from them... And that people who are different from them are actually sort of unworthy of the same rights or empathy. I don't understand that.

Racism kills people. It kills people!

Going into a room and saying, 'I'm a black lesbian' - it's a strike against you.

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.

Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.

As long as I've been playing, they never say I done anything. They always say that some white guy did it.

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

There's the continuing challenges of racism, of sexism, of discrimination against the LGBT community, of the way that we treat people as opposed to how we want to be treated.

People who are labeled as disrespectful do not get the same opportunities afforded to those who are labeled as respectful.

I was in Toronto when they had a severe outbreak of SARS - you know, Severe Asian Racism Syndrome. I was in the airport and there were these big snowboarder guys and they had white masks around their necks, and as soon as they saw me, they put their masks on. So I went "cough, cough, cough... You wanna egg rorr?

People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.

The moment you stigmatize a whole group of people - for example, Muslims - then, obviously, you make the decent, law-abiding Muslims feel as if they're under threat in some way or that their legitimacy, as members or citizens of society, is brought into question.

You don't pigeonhole yourself, people pigeonhole you. If the world is not at a place yet where it can just be like, "This music is gay and it's music," then it's not my fault that it gets pigeonholed, it's not the people in the band's fault, it's because people won't just let music be music, people who need to put a name on something or to critique something.