Race And Class Quotes

To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitious and invisible. You're everywhere you look, you're the standard against which everyone else is measured. You're like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a "woman doctor" or they will say they went to see "the doctor." People will tell you they have a "gay colleague" or they'll tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a "Black friend," but when that same person simply mentions a "friend," everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn't have the word "woman" or "gay" or "minority" in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses "literature," "history" or "political science."
This invisibility is political. ~ Michael S. Kimmel

I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies - though shifting the balance matters - but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others. ~ Rebecca Solnit

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. ~ Leslie Feinberg

People can't stand it when you deal with issues of race and class, and also sometimes the church, and you give a perspective that flushes out hypocrisy. ~ Jose Padilha

Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy; blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

Education is transformational. It changes lives. That is why people work so hard to become educated and why education has always been the key to the American Dream, the force that erases arbitrary divisions of race and class and culture and unlocks every person's God-given potential. ~ Condoleezza Rice

J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and class, journeying to war and returning home. I've heard it said that he was trying to create some kind of original British mythology using the structure of other cultures' myths, and maybe that was true. I don't know. What I see, when I read his work, is a man trying desperately to dream.
Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don't have enough myths of our own, we'll latch onto those of others - even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it's human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight. ~ N.K. Jemisin

Race and class were a kind of destiny; very little could dent them. Morgan himself had been decanted back into the vessel that had made him. ~ Damon Galgut

...that society with its hurtful views on race and class distinction would make it difficult for us to succeed. ~ Curtis W. Jackson

I'm not a preacher, but I preach. I'm not a Buddhist, but I chant. I'm not race theorist, but I have questions and ponderances around the complexities of race and class and culture wherever I am. ~ Theaster Gates

Race and class are the easiest divisions. It's very stupid. ~ Lynda Barry

Claiming the right to be nasty in resistance to gendered respectability politics is often done by women who continue to be positioned as respectable by the world at large. And the 'respectability' of bourgeois white women has been central to colonial narratives that construct us as superior to women marginalised by race and class. Affronts to this 'respectability' have justified fatal violence against men of colour. This position of race and class supremacy means that our anger may not always be as radical or transgressive as we might like. ~ Alison Phipps

Secularists argue that differences of religion were the chief cause of violence in our history - conveniently overlooking violent clashes of region, race, and class, not the least of which was the bloodiest war in history until that time, the Civil War. ~ Stephen V Monsma

To say 'radical feminist' is only a way of indicating that I believe the sexual caste system is a root of race and class and other divisions. ~ Gloria Steinem

I think it goes back to whether or not race and class - that is, race and poverty - is not becoming even more of a constraint. Because with the failing public schools, I worry that the way that my grandparents got out of poverty, the way that my parents became educated, is just not going to be there for a whole bunch of kids. ~ Condoleezza Rice

At the same time there was the good of the poor and the good of the rich. And the good of the whites, the blacks and the yellow races ... More and more goods came into being, corresponding to each sect, race and class ... People began to realise how much blood had been spilt in the name of a petty, doubtful good, in the name of the struggle of this petty good against what is belied to be evil. Sometimes the very concept of good became a scourge, a greater evil than evil itself. ~ Vasily Grossman

It is the left that uses the clubs of race and class to attack those on the right; it is the left that labels religious people and traditional values people rubes and simpletons, ~ Ben Shapiro

We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about. ~ Henry Louis Gates

Race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities. ~ Majora Carter

Like it or not, we all carry the past of our country. The unresolved conflicts of race and class lay coiled, ready to erupt, unless we set our minds to an honest reckoning with that past and a search for solutions grounded in genuine truth and justice. Unlike the cursing anonymous voice on a telephone, or the menacing face, or the billy club that split John Lewis's head in Selma, Alabama, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, implicit bias is hard to see; implicit bias is a silent snake that slinks around in ways we don't notice. ~ Mitch Landrieu

In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience. ~ Eric Foner

Remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

Look, I want what's good for everybody. I want to promote good state education for all. I want to raise standards for all kids, irrespective of race and class but why can't they all just do what I say when I know I'm right? ~ Arabella Weir

Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other. A different dynamic it seems to me is at work in the critique of new sexuality studies. ~ Judith Butler

What we need to restore power to the Christian testimony is not soft talk about brotherhood but an honest recognition that two human races occupy the earth simultaneously: a fallen race that sprang from the loins of Adam and a regenerate race that is born of the Spirit through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. ~ A.W. Tozer

When my son David was a high school senior in 2003, his graduating class went on a camping trip in the desert. A creative writing educator visited the camp and led the group through an exercise designed to develop their sensitivity and imaginations. Each student was given a pen, a notebook, a candle, and matches. They were told to walk a short distance into the desert, sit down alone, and "discover themselves." The girls followed instructions. The boys, baffled by the assignment, gathered together, threw the notebooks into a pile, lit them with the matches, and made a little bonfire. ~ Christina Hoff Sommers

Iberals see racism where it doesn't exist, fabricate it when they can't find it and ignore it within their own ranks. ~ Michelle Malkin

Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The weather plays a very big role. I have run very few races in the raining and the cold. ~ David Rudisha

Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial book is the most powerful and profound treatment of Ellison's undeniable artistic genius, deep personal flaws, and controversial political evolution. And he reveals an Ellison unbeknownst to all of us. From now on, all serious scholarship on Ellison must begin with Rampersad's instant and inimitable classic in literary biography. ~ Cornel West

Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race. ~ Pierre Bayle

The question of accumulation, Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack - there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure. Adrian ~ Julian Barnes

Just as sex is a God-given instinct for the prolongation of the human race, so the desire for property as a prolongation of one's ego is a natural right sanctioned by natural law. A person is free on the inside because he can call his soul his own; he is free on the outside because he can call property his own. Internal freedom is based upon the fact that "I am"; external freedom is based on the fact that "I have." But just as the excesses of flesh produce lust, for lust is sex in the wrong place, so there can be a deordination of the desire for property until it becomes greed, avarice, and capitalistic aggression. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

Why would affluence make him mad?"
"Maybe he's mad that this is as good as it gets. Your big house. His good school. I think it's very difficult for kids these days, in a way. The country's very prosperity has become a burden, a dead end. Everything works, doesn't it? At least if you're white and middle class. So it must often seem to young people that they're not needed. In a sense, it's as if there's nothing more to do. ~ Lionel Shriver

Italy still has a provincial sophistication that comes from its long history as a collection of city states. That, combined with a hot climate, means that the Italians occupy their streets and squares with much greater ease than the English. The resultant street life is very rich, even in small towns like Arezzo and Gaiole, fertile ground for the peeping Tom aspect of an actor's preparation. I took many trips to Siena, and was struck by its beauty, but also by the beauty of the Siennese themselves. They are dark, fierce, and aristocratic, very different to the much paler Venetians or Florentines. They have always looked like this, as the paintings of their ancestors testify. I observed the groups of young people, the lounging grace with which they wore their clothes, their sense of always being on show. I walked the streets, they paraded them. It did not matter that I do not speak a word of Italian; I made up stories about them, and took surreptitious photographs. I was in Siena on the final day of the Palio, a lengthy festival ending in a horse race around the main square. Each district is represented by a horse and jockey and a pair of flag-bearers. The day is spent by teams of supporters with drums, banners, and ceremonial horse and rider processing round the town singing a strange chanting song. Outside the Cathedral, watched from a high window by a smiling Cardinal and a group of nuns, with a huge crowd in the Cathedral Square itself, the supporters passed, and to drum r ~ Roger Allam

Slow and steady wins the race. ~ Aesop

The future of the human race outweighs all. Every death and every sacrifice are well worth the ultimate outcome. ~ James Dashner

There's a race of men that don't fit in, A race that can't sit still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. They range the field and rove the flood, And they climb the mountain's crest; Their's is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don't know how to rest. ~ Robert W. Service

When I grew up in Tanzania, I went to school with kids who were blind and deaf, and we were all in one class. There wasn't a different class or teacher for them, so they didn't learn anything. I'm hoping to organize a school to train teachers to help children with disabilities. It's my future goal. I want to move back to Tanzania and do that eventually. ~ Herieth Paul

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. ~ David Mitchell

If you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you'd think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children. ~ Mark Haddon

I'm through with you. Yes, I am going to put you down. From now on, I am my own God. I am going to live by the rules I se for myself. I'll discard everything I was once taught about you. Then I'll be you. I'll be my own God, living my life as I see fit. Not as Mr. Charlie says I should live it, or Mama or anybody else. I shall do as I want in this society that apparently wasn't meant for me and my kind. If you are getting angry because I am talking to you like this, then just kill me, leave me here in this graveyard dead. Maybe thats where all of us belong anyway. Maybe then we wouldn't have to suffer so much. At the rate we are being killed now, we'll all be soon dead anyway. ~ Anne Moody

For as long as life breathes in us, we must continue to hope, to believe, to trust, to run our race, and to finish it with flying colors. ~ Kcat Yarza

After that, he drank all the rest of the sherry, and Mr. Hubble drank the port, and the two talked (which I have since observed to be customary in such cases) as if they were of quite another race from the deceased, and were notoriously immortal. ~ Charles Dickens

Fookin' Irish, they're a race of political masochists, they love their fookin' chiefs and princes an' a strong hand belting. It's like the man said in the play, Abair and focal republic i nGaoluinn? ~ Gwyneth Jones

In one way or another, these fears echoed the beliefs of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who argued in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that governments in capitalist society were political extensions of the interests of business owners. "The executive of the state," they wrote, was "nothing more than a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."25 Over the following decades, scores of influential followers would advance various arguments that had in common a core theme. Marxists argued that the expansion of capitalism brought with it the reinforcement of class divisions and, through imperialism and the spread of finance capital around the world, the replication of these divisions both within countries and between them. ~ Moises Naim

I have my Master's Degree but I learned more at my dinner table than any class I ever took. My dad would come home from the sweat factory and put the money on the table and say Mea, here is some money for insurance and food and we always had that little extra for Friday night pizza at Barcelona's. ~ Dick Vitale

Being your best is not so much about overcoming the barriers other people place in front of you as it is about overcoming the barriers we place in front of ourselves. It has nothing to do with how many times you win or lose. It has no relation to where you finish in a race or whether you break world records. But it does have everything to do with having the vision to dream, the courage to recover from adversity and the determination never to be shifted from your goals. ~ Kieren Perkins

For Nature is accustomed to rehearse with certain large, perhaps baser, and all classes of wild (animals), and to place in the imperfect the rudiments of the perfect animals. ~ Marcello Malpighi

Some people try and fail and they get stuck in that reality. They forget that they entered the race while the other 99% of people sat around too scared to even try. ~ Nicholas Muir

There is no denying that there are 'royal roads' through existence for the upper classes; for them, at least, the highways are macadamized, swept, and watered. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon

I'm a nice middle class public schoolboy who underachieved and wasn't going anywhere fast. I didn't get any GCSEs or A-levels. But everyone was like: "Please, will you do something?" And I was thinking: "Well, I kind of like the idea of joining the French Foreign Legion." ~ Tom Hardy

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. ~ Richard Feynman

At least three further requirements supplement the strategies of environmentalists if we were to create and preserve a less violent world. 1) Every culture must begin to affirm the female future. 2) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture. 3) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race. ~ Sally Miller Gearhart

Manipulating or controlling others through the use of one's illness or suffering,for example,was-and remains-extremely effective for people who find they cannot be direct in their interactions,Who argues with someone who is in pain? And if pain is the only power a person has,health is not an attractive replacement. It was apparent to me that becoming healthy represented more than just getting over an illness. Health represented a complex progression into a state of personal empowerment in which one had to move from a condition of vulnerability to one of invincibility,from victim to victor,from silent bystander to aggressive defender of personal boundaries.Completing this race to the finish was a yeoman's task if ever there was one.Indeed,in opening the psyche and soul to the healing process,we had expanded the journey of wellness into one of personal transformation.
- ~ Caroline Myss

But we are sailors - served on the Endeavor."

"Are you, now?" the ship's master asked skeptically. "Let me see yer hands."

The master examined Hadrian's palms, looking over the various calluses and rough places while grunting occasionally. "You must have spent most of your time in the galley. You've not done any serious rope work." He examined Royce's hands and raised an eyebrow at him. "Have you ever been on a ship before? It's certain you've never handled a sheet or a capstan."

"Royce here is a - you know - " Hadrian pointed up at the ship's rigging. "The guy who goes up there."

The master shook his head and laughed. "If you two are seamen, then I'm the Prince of Percepliquis!"

"Oh, but they are, Mr. Temple," a voice declared. Wyatt exited the forecastle and came jogging toward them. A bright white shirt offset his tawny skin and black hair. "I know these men, old mates of mine. The little one is Royce Melborn, as fine a topman as they come. And the big one is, ah …"

"Hadrian." Royce spoke up.

"Right, of course. Hadrian's a fine cook - he is, Mr. Temple."

Temple pointed toward Royce. "This one's a topman? Are you joking, Wyatt?"

"No, sir, he's one of the best."

Temple looked unconvinced.

"You can have him prove it to you, sir," Hadrian offered. "You could have him race your best up the ropes."

"You mean up the shrouds," Wyatt said, correcting h ~ Michael J. Sullivan

I sympathize the first, the direct and single-minded attack [Red Revolution]. I believe it to have been necessary and inevitable in Russia. It may someday be inevitable in this country [United States of America]. I am not seriously alarmed by the sufferings of the creditor class, the troubles which the church is bound to encounter, the restrictions on certain kinds of freedom which must result, nor even by the bloodshed of the transition period. A better economic order is worth a little bloodshed. ~ Stuart Chase

Here's the thing about middle-class people. They pretend not to look, but they do. They're too polite to actually stare. Instead, they do this weird thing of catching sight of Will in their field of vision and then determinedly not looking at him. Until he's gone past, at which point their gaze flickers toward him, even while they remain in conversation with someone else. They won't talk about him, though. Because that would be rude. ~ Jojo Moyes

I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing! ~ James Baldwin

The human race, for all our facets and our institutional stupidity, is something I believe in. I admire our diversity, our stubbornness. The dynamic of conflict is one of our greatest traits. ~ Peter F. Hamilton

U.S. domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control. ~ Noam Chomsky

A handicap is like trying to race and you have a ten pound weight stuck to your waist. That is a handicap. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

THE BARROW

In this high field strewn with stones
I walk by a green mound,
Its edges sheared by the plough.
Crumbs of animal bone
Lie smashed and scattered round
Under the clover leaves
And slivers of flint seem to grow
Like white leaves among green.
In the wind, the chestnut heaves
Where a man's grave has been.

Whatever the barrow held
Once, has been taken away:
A hollow of nettles and dock
Lies at the centre, filled
With rain from a sky so grey
It reflects nothing at all.
I poke in the crumbled rock
For something they left behind
But after that funeral
There is nothing at all to find.

On the map in front of me
The gothic letters pick out
Dozens of tombs like this,
Breached, plundered, left empty,
No fragments littered about
Of a dead and buried race
In the margins of histories.
No fragments: these splintered bones
Construct no human face,
These stones are simply stones.

In museums their urns lie
Behind glass, and their shaped flints
Are labelled like butterflies.
All that they did was die,
And all that has happened since
Means nothing to this place.
Above long clouds, the skies
Turn to a brilliant red
And show in the water's face
One living, and not these dead."

- Anthony Thwaite, from The Owl In The Tree ~ Anthony Thwaite

The race will go to the curious, the slightly mad, and those with an un-satiated passion for learning and dare-deviltry. ~ Tom Peters

Can't these people leave me alone? Like first her husband approaches me out of nowhere asking about my purple vegetable, then I figure out he is the substitute teacher for the day I am late and in the end, I get whipped in front of the class, and finally they move in across from me and his wife needs sugar? ~ Nandanie Phalgoo

Men of great genius, whether their work be in poetry, philosophy or art, stand in all ages like isolated heroes, keeping up single-handed a desperate struggling against the onslaught of an army of opponents. Is not this characteristic of the miserable nature of mankind? The dullness, grosness, perversity, silliness, and brutality of by far the greater part of the race are always an obstacle to the efforts of the genius, whatever be the method of his art; they so form that hostile army to which he at last has to succumb. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer