Trying to convince someone that they are a racist or they have White Privilege - if it's in the air they breathe and the culture supports them, sometimes they never have to think about it at all.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experience. No one can eliminate prejudices—just recognize them.
I actually believe that some residue of discrimination would lessen, because it's my view that there is a certain percentage of the white population that stereotypes and makes assumptions about African Americans because they don't inject the history of slavery and Jim Crow into current incarceration rates, or crime rates, or poverty rates, or what have you.
The most effective adaptation of racism over time is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people.
I think everyone is "racist," to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at, but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.
The dumber half of the audience - whether they're male or female, and a lot of them are male - for some reason responds very quickly to the feminine voice. How can I put it? They kind of instantly react to the female voice in a positive way quicker than they would the male voice.
We all have cultural bias, racial bias. One of the difficult things around this subject matter is to deny that we have places we go to subconsciously, and unless you consciously decide that that's wrong and you've got to do something about it, especially if you're in a position of power, it won't change.
I remember once at the end of a BBC job interview the manager said to me: 'I didn't realise people like you were clever.' I don't think he was being intentionally nasty. At that time in the BBC he was surrounded by clones of himself, give or take some facial hair and glasses.
Let's be honest: For a lot of well-meaning, open-minded white people, the sight of a young, black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear.
When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I'm always surprised. I don't know if it's my low expectations for white people or what.
Prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice sometimes may degenerate into these. Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.
I'm beginning to think I have two years encountering sexism without really realising it.
Prejudice is a house-plant which is very apt to wilt if you take it out-of-doors among folks.
For a lot of white people, just suggesting that being white has meaning will trigger a deep, defensive response. And that defensiveness serves to maintain both our comfort and our positions in a racially inequitable society from which we benefit.
I think screenwriters, I think editors in the cutting room - they have a lot of responsibility that we don't think about, but they could cut the coverage of an Asian person to focus on a white person because, unknowingly, they think that white person has more to say or is more interesting.
I also acknowledge that prejudice runs very deep in our society. And, in the real world, discrimination rears its ugly head in the shadows, where it's very difficult to root it out.
I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.
We all have our prejudices, and we may or may not be aware of them. Sometimes people walk by me and give me a wider berth. It happens. I wear hoodies all the time because my head gets cold. Something innocuous can be misunderstood.
Hidden biases in both the collection and analysis stages present considerable risks and are as important to the big-data equation as the numbers themselves.
When I go into a pitch room and I'm pitching something with a writing partner, everybody tends to look at the guy, even if I'm doing a lot of the talking.
Most often, qualifications are defined by the credentials of the person who last held the job. If that is to continue to be the litmus test, white males will continue to be the top choice on any list, if the interviewer is also a white male.
We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.
It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.
At my degree show, someone said, 'It's nice, but it's very feminine.' I said, thank you, taking it as a compliment, but they obviously meant it as an insult.
Prejudice marks a mental landmine.
