Identity Suppression Quotes

One of the most welcome aspects of office work is that you do not need to be fully yourself.

My father's mother was a secular Jew who died in Auschwitz. I only found out as an adult because my father never talked about it. He was a secularist and never defined himself in ethnic terms - partly, I think, because he was scared; partly out of the habit of not talking of such things; partly because he didn't like being defined by other people.

Many Muslim parents are authoritarian, which leaves young men and women with limited spaces to express themselves. Self-expression and autonomy are regarded as symptoms of 'Westernisation.'

All my life I've been hiding.

As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.

In society, there is enormous pressure for us to try and look good, to be politically correct, to say the right things, to be polite and basically to sacrifice ourselves on the way.

I don't know their names. Their names have been erased from my memory banks. If I tried to bring 'em back, I'd get shocked.

I used to be gay, but I was forced to give it up, because it made my eyes water.

Growing up in a school that was majority white, my understanding of the world was that I was different but that differences shouldn't be talked about because it's uncomfortable.

Being young, working class, and black, everything you do is policed. If someone hits you and you hit back, you are aggressive. If you cry, you are weak. You are kind of always pretending to be something.

What you have when everyone wears the same playclothes for all occasions, is addressed by nickname, expected to participate in Show And Tell, and bullied out of any desire form privacy, is not democracy; it is kindergarten.

During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire.

The thing is, what most people don't understand is that there are so many of us growing up in Europe who are not free to be ourselves. We're not allowed to be who we are. We are not free to marry or to be in relationships with people that we choose. We can't even pick our own career. This is the norm in the Muslim heartlands of Europe.

I think women have long been defined by their roles as procreators and wives, and we're expected to serve, take care of, say 'Yes,' and not ruffle any feathers. Women, in particular, are sometimes not allowed to consider who they are outside of the roles that they play.

There are many lesbians and gay men trapped by their fear into silence and invisibility, and they exist in a dim valley of terror wearing nooses of conformity.

It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.

Especially for young POC, when we enter majority-white spaces, we feel the need to assimilate, to blend in, to prove ourselves. I don't think we discuss it enough.

To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'

The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.

If people are hiding their sexuality, they don't really get their full selves, so you can sometimes feel like you're presenting sort of like a fogged version of yourself.

The system of domination is founded on depriving nations of their true identity. It seeks to deprive nations of their culture, identity, self-confidence and in this way dominate them.

One of the ways of helping to destroy a people is to tell them they don't have a history that they have no roots.

My father and his brothers never mentioned to their English wives and children that they were Jewish. Being Hungarian was exotic and foreign enough to begin with, and so long as they were not asked, they found it easier, from 1919 on, to let the matter drop.

Having been an actor in Hollywood for a certain amount of time, I always felt a pressure to be sort of a neutral person. 'Don't do anything to your hair. Don't tell them your age. Don't tell them you're gay. Don't tell them anything that could limit you, specify you as a person.' I always hated that, actually moved out of L.A. because of that.

The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.