Second-Class Citizenship Quotes

I was taught from a young age that many people would treat me as a second-class citizen because I was African-American and because I was female.

I'm not saying to you that every element of segregation and discrimination and second-class citizenship has changed. But in the political sense, the world has changed. People now who want to vote can vote.

In Puerto Rico, we continue to see the perpetuation of second-class citizenship in the United States.

Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.

All the old forms of discrimination, the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind, are now perfectly legal once you've been labeled a felon.

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

There are ordinary spaces where people do, more or less, share neighbourhoods. In Haifa, there are whole communities that are more or less integrated. But of course that is with Palestinian Israelis who have, for the most part, accepted certain kinds of cooperative models, and also accept second-class citizenship.

The very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That's why I say we have not ended racial caste in America; we've merely redesigned it.

The formerly incarcerated - returning citizens - often face a cruel irony in America. Having paid their debt to society, too many are banned from the ballot box that could help them dismantle policies that essentially extend their sentences.

After World War II Black American veterans discovered that German prisoners of war could become citizens and enjoy more democracy in America than they could.

If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life. These men are part of a growing undercaste - not class, caste - a group of people who are permanently relegated, by law, to an inferior second-class status.

I wish I could be proud of being an Israeli citizen, but how can I do that when I'm not really recognized as a full citizen?

Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon.

The law in Russia bans "propaganda of homosexuality," which is defined as dissemination of information that can cause harm to the spiritual or physical development of children, including forming in them the erroneous impression of the social equality of traditional and nontraditional sexual relations. It's a law that actually enshrines second-class citizenship - it makes it a crime to claim social equality.

Citizenship obtained through naturalization is not a second-class citizenship.