Sonia Sotomayor Quotes

Affirmative action has a negative effect on our society when it means counting us like so many beans and dividing us into separate piles.

You can’t be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval of affirmative action.… We have to prove ourselves and we have to work hard doing it.

In the area of economic justice, we still have a long way to go. We have too many people who are discriminated against just because they happen to be black or they happen to be a woman or some other minority.

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America

I think that affirmative action programs can be very important.

The only reason race matters is because of racism.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

And nothing embittered me, which is important, because I think ethnic people and women in this society can end up being embittered because of the lack of affirmative action, you know.

I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it.

The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn't work.

In spite of what some people claim, we are not in a post-racial era. I think it's still an important issue to bring up.

Affirmative action is under attack today, not because it has failed, but because it succeeded.

If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane.

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

Our nation's long neglect of minorities whose skin is dark is perhaps only a little worse than our neglect of another minority whose hair is white.

There's not a white man in this country who can say he never benefited from being white.

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.

Racial preferences are dead. All that is required now is to give them a decent and honorable burial.

We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world - for whites, anyway.

Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination... Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the black middle class.

In America, many marginally competent or flatly incompetent whites are hired every day -some because their white skin suits the conscious or unconscious racial preference of their employers. The white children of alumni are often grandfathered into elite universities in what can only be seen as a residual benefit of historic white privilege.

To abandon affirmative action is to say there is nothing more to be done about discrimination.

I couldn't see why a black man wasn't allowed to drink out of the same water fountain or sit in the same bus or go to the same schools as a white guy.

While individual whites may be against racism, they still benefit from the distribution of resources controlled by their group.