Standing Bear Quotes

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

I was fortunate enough to have been raised to a certain point before I got into the race thing. I had other views of what a human is, so I was never able to see racism as the big question. Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life.

To be white and male is not to be sexist and racist.

If you're white working with non-white people, you will be branded as a colonialist by some people, regardless of your efforts or intentions.

I grew up in Welwyn Garden City, and when you're a woman of colour in a predominantly white area, you become aware of prejudice from a young age.

If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.

I've always been a fan of issues around race and racialism, and I've loved playing with it. People act as though it isn't an issue, but it's a recurring theme in our lives globally.

I have seen vast, perhaps unbelievable, changes during the journey that has brought me from the flicker of a lamp in a small Bengal village to the chandeliers of Delhi.

People can't stand it when you deal with issues of race and class, and also sometimes the church, and you give a perspective that flushes out hypocrisy.

Baby, black promoters oppressed me before white promoters ever got hold of me. Don't talk skin to me.

It is not that we have class prejudice, but only that we find comfort and ease in our own class. And normally there are plenty of people of our own class, or race, or religion to play, live, and eat with, and to marry.

The idea of progress has a couple of contradictions … it leads to Eurocenterism….

Civilizations are a matter of the mind.

In the history of the world, slavery has been and still is the normal condition of most men; all the great accumulations of property have been the result of slavery, and civilization was the result of property…. art, literature, science, architecture, beautiful women, and gentlemen of leisure all depend upon the forced labor of masses of ignorant men whom to make free would be a social crime.

We are to call barbarism whatever differs from our own customs. Indeed, we seem to have no other standard of truth and reason than the opinions and customs of our own country. There at home is always the perfect religion, the perfect legal system--the perfect and most accomplished way of doing everything.

Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price.

Today, the grandeur of a country is measured by the extent to which it defends and extends its citizens' rights through its impulse towards total equality, by its capacity to create energy that contributes towards cultural, social and economic growth. That is how a country becomes strong, by making its citizens more powerful.

The whole issue of race and discrimination is a moral issue.

In fact, for blacks who have education and who have not succumbed to a new lifestyle—the grievances, and the coarseness represented by rap music—it’s gotten tremendously better. What’s disheartening, though, is that when you study ethnic groups around the world, the ones that are lagging behind are those where their leaders always tell the same story: that it’s other people holding you back, and that therefore you need to stand against those other people and resist their culture. But that culture may be the key to success.

Whether I realize it or not, I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender - and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it.

I think it's really progressive to talk about race in relationships. I think there is so much room for that, and there needs to be more of it.

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

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.

Racial bias does exist, and until we can all admit its existence and become introspective as to whether our own personal biases are impacting how we deal with others, there will be no change.

When you discuss racism, it's almost a no-win scenario - but I don't think that means we shouldn't be discussing it.