Best 95 quotes in «segregation quotes» category

The liberal philosophy of race relations emphasized the stigma of segregation and the hypocrisy of a government that celebrates freedom and equality yet denies both on account of race. This philosophy, born in the North, never gained much traction among Southern whites or blacks.

The moment you try to theorize basic human values, you inadvertently start digging your own grave, and that's exactly what the whole of humanity has been doing so far. We all have been digging our own grave and started living in that grave calling it our home, without knowing the true essence of living. We have been destroying each other in proving the delusional greatness of each other's grave. We live in graves and call them home, and we further sustain the neurotic structure of those graves with elements of so-called sociological, cultural, traditional, religious, political and intellectual significance.

There are probably no white journalists in America who would say they chose their houses because they were in white neighborhoods, but that, in effect, is what they do. Peter Brown of the Orlando Sentinel looked up the zip codes of 3,400 journalists, and found that they cluster in upscale neighborhoods, far from inner cities. More than one-third of Washington Post reporters live in just four fancy D.C. suburbs. Television personality Chris Matthews routinely promotes integration, and Ted Koppel hectored whites who live apart from blacks. Where do they live? Mr. Matthews in 95-percent white Chevy Case, and Mr. Koppel in Potomac, also in Maryland, which had a black population of 3.9 percent. Perhaps these men thought they lived inside their television sets. Sociologist Charles Gallagher of La Salle University has noted that television advertising is a 'carefully manufactured racial utopia [...] that is far afield of reality,' where everyone has black and Hispanic neighbors with whom they discuss which brand of toothpaste is best. Jerome D. Williams, a professor of advertising and African American studies at the University of Texas at Austin also laughs at advertisers' depictions of American life, adding that 'if you look at the United States in terms of where we live and who our friends are and where we go to church, we live in different worlds.

There's no evidence from decades of Pew Research surveys that public opinion, in the aggregate, is more extreme now than in the past. But what has changed -- and pretty dramatically -- is the growing tendency of people to sort themselves into political parties based on their ideological differences.

There are too many people to speak up for their religion, for their country, for their language and so on, but very few to speak for the humankind. So speak up, for every word that you utter, every action that you take, with humanitarian responsibility, will contribute a great deal in eradicating parts of the discrimination that has polluted our beautiful planet. And if you choose not to speak up and stay deaf, dumb and blind instead, then take this oath - "all bigots, fundamentalists and sectarianists are my bosom friends - I shall always be faithful to them - I shall always stand by them, no matter how inhuman they behave - and I shall always do my best to promote their atrocities by maintaining my silence in the face of prejudice, hatred and inhumanism".

The relevant question is not whether back then a few extraordinary individuals could overcome a system strongly weighted against them or whether today an admittedly far greater number requiring far less talent can succeed. The real question is whether it's harder for the people in this audience to succeed be they extraordinary, average, or below average. If it is, and I think it obvious that it is, then that's untenable in a country that purports to provide equal opportunity for all. Now of course you'll dispute my claim that it is more difficult to succeed for them. You say the battle's over. I say not only is it not over but you yourself are stationed on the frontline of the battle and have been all these years. This room and the criminal justice system as a whole is the frontline. This is where modern-day segregation lives on.

There’s only one way America’s neighborhoods will begin to integrate: people have to want it more than vested public and corporate interests are opposed to it. And more people should want it. Mixed-race, mixed-income housing is a product we need to market. It’s the only real solution to segregated schools, for one. (140)

There's only one difference between slaughter and laughter and that's an s. It's all two sides of one thing and you got to make sure you're on the laughing side.

The wounding legacy of segregation and growing up knowing adults who had worked for civil rights and equal opportunities for African Americans was part of what made me understand that many kids in my community and around the world were still treated differently because of the color of their skin.  My mothers work on behalf of girls and women, first in Arkansas and later around the world, helped me understand how being born a girl is often seen as a reason to deny someone the right to go to school or make her own decisions, or even about who or when to marry.  One of the unique things about SEWA [Self-Employed Women's Association] is that it brings together Muslim and Hindu women in a part of the world where fighting between people from different religious backgrounds has cost countless lives, both between countries and within India.  Women from all different backgrounds told us how they'd learned how much more they had in common than they'd first thought because of their different religions. Their support for each other gave them the confidence to stand up to bullying and harassment, and the relationships they'd built helped prevent violence between Hindus and Muslims, because they saw each other as friends and real people, not only as representatives of different religions.

The world needs madness, a madness for justice, a madness for harmony, a madness for equality, a madness for humanitarian glory. If everyone had the madness for doing good, there wouldn't be any misery in the world. So, be mad, be furious, be rebellious towards every bit of misery, inequality and injustice in the world. Remember, every injustice anywhere in the world is your business, every misery anywhere in the world is your business, every segregation anywhere in the world is your business. Human condition anywhere in the world is your business.

ʺThey are all the same!ʺ Is the cruelest gallows humankind ever built. - On Stereotypes and Sweeping Statements

The way to peace is acceptance.

They hate you not because of what you have done but because of who you are; you are different from who they are, and you are occupying the ground they want for themselves.

Today's college students demand a self-segregating "safe space". Rosa Parks spinning in her grave.

To be born into, to go to school, to study, to learn, to play, to worship, to love, to work and to die in segregation and not have one single person who loved, mentored or guided me convey that there was any loss.

UNDIVIDED I am for One world undivided. One world without fear and corruption. One world ruled by Truth and Justice. I am for One peaceful world for all, Where hate has been overcome by love, And everyone is guided only By their conscience.

Unwed white girls who became pregnant in the postwar years were considered psychologically disturbed but treatable, whereas their black counterparts were presumed to be biologically hypersexual and deviant. Historian Rickie Solinger demonstrates that in the 1950s an unwed white girl who became pregnant could go to a maternity home before her pregnancy showed, deliver the baby and give it up for adoption, and return home to her community with no one the wiser. (White parents concocted stories of their daughters being given the opportunity to study for a semester with relatives.) She could then resume the role of the "nice" girl. Unwed pregnant black girls, on the other hand, were barred from maternity homes; they were threatened with jail or termination of welfare; and they were accused of using their sexuality in order to be eligible for larger welfare checks. Politicians regarded unwed pregnant black girls as a societal problem, declaring--as they continue to declare today--that they did not want taxpayers to support black illegitimate babies, and sought to control black female sexuality through sterilization legislation.

We have greater political and social conflict because we must add unfamiliarity with fellow citizens of different racial backgrounds to the challenges we confront in resolving legitimate disagreements about public issues. Racial polarization stemming from our separateness has corrupted our politics, permitting leaders who ignore the interests of white working-class voters to mobilize them with racial appeals.

Wash out the darkness like the scarlet sun - be the cloud and run towards the thirsty land to drench it with your soothing monsoon - be the breeze and share happiness with others beyond all petty selfishness.

We had a saying that we worked "from can to can't," which means working from when you can see (sunup) to when you can't (sundown).

When someone harms our daughter or sister or wife, our rage and courage practically turn infinite and we do not even imagine of stopping until the perpetrators are brought to justice, yet when mindless barbarians keep raping the very fabric of humanity in the name of race, religion and nation, we somehow manage to accept it as the norm. What a hypocrisy! What a bunch of losers we are! Okay, be a loser - live as a loser - crawl through the several decades of your life as a loser - but don't you dare to boast about being human. Because if you don't have the guts and conscience to act against discrimination, segregation and bigotry, then you don't deserve the title of human. Losers don't make humans, just like bigots and barbarians ain't no human. If we are to look at the mirror and say out loud – yes, that’s me, a human – then we must, not should, but must, be accountable for not just our individual reality, but for our societal reality as well.

When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Why [...] is it so hard to build a society in which race does not matter? To the extent that Americans even ask themselves this question, they would say that it is because Americans--whites, especially--have not tried hard enough. And yet, how much harder can a people try? Today, after 50 years of trying, most whites cannot muster much more than exhausted resignation in the face of reports on school resegregation and yawning gaps in test scores or poverty rates. [...] If, generation after generation, Americans tend to segregate themselves, is it possible that the expectations for integration were not reasonable? If diversity is a source of tension are there risks in basing policies on the assumption that it is a strength? If non-white groups continue to advance race-based interests, is it wise for whites to continue to act as if they have none?

With wrong people, there has to be a choice, to stay with them and go down with them or reject them and suffer alone.

We were like captive animals that had lost the will to fight. We even went so far as to defend the very constraints that they had imposed upon us.

I feel that segregation is totally unchristian, and that it is against everything the Christian religion stands for.

I am not a racist in any form whatsoever. I don't believe in any form of discrimination or segregation.

[Barack Obama] grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. He wasn't directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.

I concede that segregation can allay social tensions immediately, but it further debilitates us in the long run.

I found Viola Desmond was the first woman whose case was taken up in the courts, and it wasn't that she tried to sue them for throwing her out of the theatre; it was that they took the law and used it to arrest her. That was really shocking to me. We had no laws in Canada actually requiring segregation, like they did in the United States. But here we had people using the law - the amusements tax act - to enforce segregation, and our courts allowed them to do that.

Segregation is the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.

I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God.

L.A is a huge place, literally and metaphorically. Its beauty and horror. Its unconventional history. Its draw and allure. Its diversity and segregation.

In the segregated South, education was almost like armor. It was a way to put yourself in a category where even with the slings and arrows and humiliations of racism and segregation, somehow you had better control of the situation. I always said my parents understood that you might not be able to control your circumstances, but they and their parents believed that you could control your reaction to your circumstances.

Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.

There's no room in my life for religion. Religion is separation and segregation of God. How can you segregate the Almighty?

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

Richard Donner made great movies. Seminal movies. The Academy, though, and we have to be careful here, should recognize popular films. Popular films are what make it all work. There was a time when popular movies were commercial movies, and they were good movies, and they had to be good movies. There was no segregation between good independent films and popular movies.

We don't go for segregation. We go for separation. Separation is when you have your own. You control your own economy; you control your own politics; you control your own society; you control your own everything.

Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.

We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.

Vouchers lead to competition, not re-segregation.

When you live under the power of terror and segregation, you can't ever start a work of art.

Civility applies while dealing with humans, but while dealing with primitive apes in the shape of humans, you must be firm, because if you are not, these apes will turn this world back into the jungle whence we came.

Across the street at the New Orleans headquarters of the Lighthouse for the Blind—a two-story building attached to a four-story stucco lighthouse—another Christmas party was under way, and Wright watched as the sightless guests arrived. Then, before his eyes, a curious scene unfolded. As they were greeted by their hosts, the blind whites were escorted to a large room at the front of the house, whereas the blind Negroes were taken to the rear, where they stayed. Separated. Transfixed, Wright had to look twice before it dawned on him: 'They couldn’t see to segregate themselves

Because the drug war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, when drug offenders are released, they are generally returned to racially segregated ghetto communities--the places they call home. In many cities, the re-entry phenomenon is highly concentrated in a small number of neighborhoods. According to one study, during a twelve-year period, the number of prisoners returning home to "core counties"--those counties that contain the inner city of a metropolitan area--tripled. The effects are felt throughout the United States. In interviews with one hundred residents of two Tallahassee, Florida communities, researchers found that nearly every one of them had experienced or expected to experience the return of a family member from prison. Similarly, a survey of families living in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago found that the majority of residents either had a family member in prison or expected one to return from prison within the next two years. Fully 70 percent of men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five in the impoverished and overwhelmingly black North Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago's West Side are ex-offenders, saddled for life with a criminal record. The majority (60 percent) were incarcerated for drug offenses. These neighborhoods are a minefield for parolees, for a standard condition of parole is a promise not to associate with felons. As Paula Wolff, a senior executive at Chicago Metropolis 2020 observes, in these ghetto neighborhoods, "It is hard for a parolee to walk to the corner store to get a carton of milk without being subject to a parole violation.

Become the bridge-builder, not the wall-raiser.

[Clyde Ross] was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service.

Eugenics is not just a tool of totalitarianism. Eugenics, as it was conceived, could not be anything but totalitarian as it desired to control all aspects of society. Hitler’s “National Socialist” (Nationalsozialist) form of government was amongst the first to put the full force of its government to conduct compulsory health initiatives. It is by no coincidence that the Dachau concentration camp used its slave-labor to run the largest organic produce farm of the era.

For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all.