Prejudice and Bias Quotes

The harsh fact of the matter is that this nation has not remotely come to grips with how many of its laws are rooted in slavery and bigoted oppression. After the Civil War, the United States never said, 'Let's examine every law and policy and system and structure we have to evaluate whether or not they were created as a tools of oppression.'

I believe racism has killed more people than speed, heroin, or cancer, and will continue to kill until it is no more.

We have to be honest, we have to be truthful and speak to the one dirty secret in American life, and that is racism.

Discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business.

In such a colony, the highest capacities of mind and heart, which, as every unprejudiced observer will confess, can readily be discovered in a large number of individuals of our nation, would be sooner and more rapidly developed than our present social life admits of, where so many circumstances unite to stifle the most splendid, most promising natural abilities in the bud.

You can't be perceived as 'the black actress who doesn't get the same kind of roles as the white actress.' You gotta run the same race. You gotta give the same quality of performances. You gotta have the same standard of excellence, even though people know that you're coming to the race in a deficit. That's just what life is about.

And I'm hoping that fair-minded people will stand up and say that what's been done to me is wrong, and that-that people's personal lives have no impact on their ability to be a journalist, you know. Why should my past prevent me from having a future?

That's such a great book [Bloods]. That's a perfect way to articulate this thing that we're talking about. Just because someone is a black general, doesn't mean this person is going to have a certain outlook on it.

We are told, if you work hard, you'll succeed—but if that were true, Black people would own this country.

But, as potentially the first African American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations; conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. Was I too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?

It slaps your dignity just right. I loved the idea of these proud, dignified black men, and I saw the older ones wounded, and it wounded me ten times as much because I couldn't stand seeing them hurt like this.

Incarceration rates, especially black incarceration rates, have soared regardless of whether crime is going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole.

If you're a poor white person and your life sucks, it's easy for you to blame Hispanics cos you don't want to look in the mirror and say, 'I'm the reason my life sucks.' The Republicans do a good job exploiting that.

If you're a woman of colour and you have any level of education, you have to adapt.

I never will let anyone make, maneuver me into making a distinction between the Mississippi form of discrimination and the New York City form of discrimination. It's, it's both discrimination; it's all discrimination.