Intergroup Relations Quotes

Being in the immigrant rights space, I've heard a lot of transactional talk with questions like, 'When will black people show up for immigrants?'

One of the problems in our lives is that people from different segments of our society just don't communicate with each other, nor do you ever see entertainment where they communicate with each other and fight with each other.

For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.

I have worked hard to build relationships between Jewish people and black people.

Whatever the evolutionary basis of religion, the xenophobia it now generates is clearly maladaptive.

One of the great barriers to peace in the Middle East is that both sides, both Israel and the Palestinians, do not understand that they share a collective destiny.

War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars.

All conflict is about difference; whether the difference is race religion, or nationality.

The other thing is even the Jews in the course - even though metaphorically aligning themselves with Indians, and, you know, you have genocide aligning itself with another genocide.

Reconciliation is a long process. We don't have the kind of race clashes that we thought would happen. What we have is xenophobia, and it's very distressing. But maybe you ought to be lenient with us. We've been free for just 12 years.

In Rikers, you had the Italians over here, the Spanish over here, the Blacks here, then there would be your Christians here and your Muslim brotherhood here. It's just like the outside, but in very closed quarters where you have to get along or else. The sense of claustrophobia in 'Orange is the New Black' - that's real.

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.

My mistakes made were learning how to work with different groups of people. I mean, I went to school at Berkeley, which is a pretty diverse group, but working in a professional setting, I hadn't really done that before and learning about office politics, learning about interactions between different people and I made a lot of mistakes there during my time as a young person. I was 19 or 20 at the time. So, I would say those were my biggest career mistakes, but fortunately they were made in the context of an engineering co-op program and not in a professional field.

I remember as a child of eight being told by a young friend that I had killed Christ. That was news to me. It's a common experience for the Jewish young. Should later generations of Germans be burdened with the guilt arising from the profound inhumanity of their ancestors? Revenge may be sweet, but guilt is non-transferable. Still, hatreds survive with the persistence of cockroaches.

Dividing into teams doesn't necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility.

Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.

I knew that there had been times in the past-terrible times-when people had destroyed others in haste,in fear, and had brought about their own destruction

War, hate, jealousy, racism - what are they but manifestations of fear?

Inside of all of us we have these patterns where we eventually become at least ethnocentric. We care about our group, our mom, our dad, our family, our religion. And some people, eventually, evolve beyond that until they're more human-centric or even spirit-centric where they care about everything.

So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the 'global village' we would propagate prejudice and ignorance. There was absolutely no harm in being part of a small group - indeed, with our hunter-gatherer band mentality it gave comfort, provided us with an inner circle of friends who could be utterly trusted, who were absolutely reliable. It helped give us peace of mind. The danger came only from drawing that sharp line, digging that ditch, laying that minefield, between our own group and any other group that thought differently.

The best hope for peace in the world lies in the simple but far-reaching recognition that we all have many different associations and affiliations, and we need not see ourselves as being rigidly divided by a single categorization of hardened groups, which confront each other.

I would warn any minority student today against the temptations of self-segregation: take support and comfort from your own group as you can, but don’t hide within it.

All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like..I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don’t challenge ourselves to actually practice.

It's not just a struggle for blacks to be accepted by whites, but the other way around as well. A lot of people don't see that.

Fear is created which can lead to racism. However, we can overcome that fear through trust.