Colorblindness Quotes & Sayings

In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color "criminals" and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. — Michelle Alexander

If colorblindness seems to backfire, is there something that does help our children - and us - navigate the dangerous shoals of race? Yes: talking openly about racial differences and what they might mean. Psychological research shows that cognitive biases in social judgment "can be controlled only through subsequent, deliberate 'mental correction' that takes group status squarely into account. — Ian F. Haney-Lopez

Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events, droughts and floods is in line with what climate scientists have been predicting for decades - and evidence is mounting that what's happening is more severe than predicted, and will get far worse still if we fail to act. — David Suzuki

Oh, you know what bloggers are like, they write and write and write. I don't know why, because they're not being paid. — Jon Ronson

In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley. — Charles Dickens

You are organic, aren't you? Or am I talking to a statue again? — Christina Daley

There should be a public outcry about what happened to me and other women in the name of our government! But history has shown "the customs of society and laws of the State allowed it to crush my aspirations and barred me from the the pursuit of almost every object worthy of an intelligent, rational mind."45 What law has the right to entrust the interest of myself and my children into the hands of such an evil bunch of men? I did not occupy my rightful place in 1976.
45. (paraphrased from Gurko, Miriram, The Ladies of Seneca Falls; the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement, 1974. — Diane Chamberlain

I've seen people die. Die hard. Die messy. Job like mine, you live with the reaper every day. But if you're unlucky, it's not the bullets that kill you in this gig. It's moment like these. Killing you one piece at a time. — Amie Kaufman

There are some well-meaning liberals who continue to cling to colorblindness out of loyalty to a utopian vision of a raceless society. But for most fans of colorblindness, its attraction lies in that it sounds fair - even as it fosters the impression that discrimination against whites is rampant, and works assiduously to defeat policies actually geared to achieving integration. — Ian F. Haney-Lopez

She realizes she doesn't know as much as God but feels she knows as much as God knew when he was her age. — Dorothy Parker

As a modern-day role model, I'd have to go for Tiger Woods. I'm also a massive Sachin Tendulkar fan. — Mark Lawrenson

We cannot let colorblindness become myopia which masks the reality that many "created equal" have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens. — William J. Brennan

We will in fact encourage them to commit more suicides. We have given them death and poison. — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

In as much time as it takes to smoke a cigarette, a person's life was changed forever. — Karen McQuestion

Midian is where the monsters go. — Clive Barker

I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog. — Ralph Vaughan Williams

Innovation is finding the door of opportunity and revealing its beauty. — Debasish Mridha

For example, advocates are frequently asked, When will we (finally) become a colorblind society? The pursuit of colorblindness makes people impatient. With courage, we should respond: Hopefully never. Or if those words are too difficult to utter, then say: "Not in the foreseeable future. — Michelle Alexander

It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future. — Paulo Coelho

I've put up with too much, too long, and now I'm just too intelligent, too powerful, too beautiful, too sure of who I am finally to deserve anything less. — Sandra Cisneros

If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois's famous words, "the problem of the color line," then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification. — Naomi Murakawa

Some well-meaning folks think if we stop talking about racism, it'll magically disappear, like the smell of an errant fart. But like a fart, people might try to be polite and ignore it, but everyone knows it's there. Avoidance has never been a great tactic in solving any problem. For most situations in life, not addressing what's going wrong only makes matters worse. It's like someone breaks your arm, and the person who slammed the baseball bat into it is saying, 'The only reason it won't heal is because you keep complaining that it hurts.' How about you get me a cast so the bone can set straight again? America does not want to put the effort into providing this cast. This is why we must talk about race, and we must do it openly. — Luvvie Ajayi

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — Michelle Alexander