minority perspective Quotes

I think being Jewish has been covered really well but almost nothing about being fundamentalist Protestant. For years, I've had a movie in my mind called 'Total Immersion' that looks to my life as a kid where you're immersed in this different worldview from almost everybody around you.

I've been there; I've been in the minority before. It humbles the exalted. But that's all right.

We were like a white family from the 1920s or something. My parents had this bizarre, different way of looking at things from the people that surrounded us. I went to an all-Mexican grade school and an all-black high school, and not many people in those places liked the same stuff as me.

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

Ever since I've had any political awareness, I've felt either alone or part of a tiny minority.

As long as you are in that white privilege bubble, you don't need to see the world differently. You don't need to see the world through the eyes of minorities or women.

I see the effects of sexual and gender liberation all around me, just like you do, but I don't have a sense of being in the majority.

As a woman of color you have little more permission to go deeper and question things because your identity, in a way, is a shield. But if you come at it from a minority status, my person, who I am, softens the blow of whatever it is that I'm saying, because I am that.

I love gentiles. In fact, on of my favorite activities is Protestant spotting.

I'm conscious of my race and ethnicity in the legislature - it's hard not to be.

I come more and more to the conclusion that one must take the side of the minority which is always the more intelligent one.

Sometimes I just like the feeling of being a minority and seeing how far you can push yourself in extreme circumstances.

African Americans have always known that a little bit of paranoia was healthy for us.

You gain all of the rights and privileges and respects that are afforded the majority, and that's ultimately what matters for your kids, or anybody - because we're all innocent of the fact that we are the way we are. But it also means the ways that you coped, and the languages and narratives and points of view that you had no choice but to make from the sidelines - and that often carried with them really acute readings of dominant society - those no longer have the same need.

I'm a Jew. I think every Jew is dark in certain ways.

For us in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.

A part of being black in America and, you know, I presume being any minority, is constantly being told that we're being too aware of race somehow, we're obsessed with it or we're seeing racism where there just isn't racism.

We've all been watching stories about heterosexuals forever... As a gay kid, you are always having to translate. You are always having to pretend like you are one of the other characters. You're not seeing your life accurately reflected.

I've always had an underdog perspective.

I understand if everyone looking at me is seeing a Jew and seeing me as a kind of 'other.' But I can't be expected to see myself that way. That is, to me, Jewish is the normal way to be; it's not a type of being.

You wake up white, and you think about certain things every day. You wake up black, and you think about certain things. You wake up Chinese, and you think certain things - but those things aren't major. What's major is that you are good at your craft.

We, the English educated Indians, often unconsciously make the terrible mistake of thinking that the microscopic minority of the English-speaking Indians is the whole of India.

When you are a member of an out-group, and you challenge others with whom you share this outsider position to examine some aspect of their lives that distorts differences between you, then there can be a great deal of pain.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.