Nationality Discrimination Quotes

Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.

Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

These stupid biases and discrimination are the reason our country is so screwed up. It's Tamil first, Indian later. Punjabi first, Indian later. It has to end. National anthem, national currency, national teams - still, we won't marry our children outside our state. How can this intolerance be good for our country?

Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.

A NATION'S GREATNESS DEPENDS ON ITS LEADER To vastly improve your country and truly make it great again, start by choosing a better leader. Do not let the media or the establishment make you pick from the people they choose, but instead choose from those they do not pick. Pick a leader from among the people who is heart-driven, one who identifies with the common man on the street and understands what the country needs on every level. Do not pick a leader who is only money-driven and does not understand or identify with the common man, but only what corporations need on every level. Pick a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship. Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist. Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies. Most importantly, a great leader must serve the best interests of the people first, not those of multinational corporations. Human life should never be sacrificed for monetary profit. There are no exceptions. In addition, a leader should always be open to criticism, not silencing dissent. Any leader who does not tolerate criticism from the public is afraid of their dirty hands to be revealed under heavy light. And such a leader is dangerous, because they only feel secure in the darkness. Only a leader who is free from corruption welcomes scrutiny; for scrutiny allows a good leader to be an even greater leader. And lastly, pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

I believe that the universe was formed around 15 billion years ago and that humans have evolved from their apelike ancestors over the past few million years. I believe we are more likely to live a good life if all humans try to work together in a world community, preserving planet earth. When decisions for groups are made in this world, I believe that the democratic process should be used. To protect the individual, I believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from religion, freedom of inquiry, and a wall of separation between church and state. When making decisions about what is right or wrong, I believe I should use my intelligence to reason about the likely consequences of my actions. I believe that I should try to increase the happiness of everyone by caring for other people and finding ways to cooperate. Never should my actions discriminate against people simply because of their race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, or national origin. I believe that ideas about what is right and wrong will change with education, so I am prepared to continually question ideas using evidence from experience and science. I believe there is no valid evidence to support claims for the existence of supernatural entities and deities. I will use these beliefs to guide my thinking and my actions until I find good reasons for revising them or replacing them with other beliefs that are more valid.

Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another.

Those who benefit from unearned privilege are too often quick to discount those who don't.

Bigotry hurts the economy, so the next time you want to blame minorities for your problems, first take a look in the mirror.

The world since Adam has been white—and corrupt. The world of tomorrow will be black—and righteous. In the white world there has been nothing but slavery, suffering, death and colonialism. In the black world of tomorrow, there will be true freedom, justice and equality for all. And that day is coming—sooner than you think.

No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They’re robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it’s the truth. They are a black body with a white brain.

What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay. It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It is not patriotic to cultivate a relationship with Muammar Gaddafi; or to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders. It is not patriotic to call upon Russia to intervene in an American presidential election. It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies. It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs. It is not patriotic to solicit foreign policy advice from someone who owns shares in a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to read a foreign policy speech written by someone on the payroll of a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to appoint a national security adviser who has taken money from a Russian propaganda organ. It is not patriotic to appoint as secretary of state an oilman with Russian financial interests who is the director of a Russian-American energy company and has received the “Order of Friendship” from Putin. The point is not that Russia and America must be enemies. The point is that patriotism involves serving your own country. The

Through its inability to solve its racial problems, the United States handed the Soviet Union one of the most effective propaganda weapons in their arsenal. Newly independent countries around the world, eager for alliances that would support their emerging identities and set them on their path to long-term prosperity, were confronted with a version of the same question black Americans had asked during World War II. Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America's model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them?

It is no contradiction to oppose the criminalization of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, etc., while at the same time declaring that such behavior is immoral and unethical.

Bigotry and sexism destroy the unity needed for a nation to live.

Women represent 70 percent of the 1.3 billion people in our world who live in absolute poverty. Consequently, as Joan Holmes, president of the Hunger Project, points out, any realistic efforts to change patterns of chronic hunger and poverty require changing traditions of discrimination against women.

Israel’s settler colonialism differed from its predecessors’ in another way. Where European powers colonized from a position of strength and a claim to God-given superiority, the post-Holocaust Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the reverse: on Jewish victimization and vulnerability. The tacit argument many Zionists were making at the time was that Jews had earned the right to an exception from the decolonial consensus—an exception born of their very recent near extermination. The Zionist version of justice said to Western powers: If you could establish your empires and your settler colonial nations through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft, then it is discrimination to say that we cannot. If you cleared your land of its Indigenous inhabitants, or did so in your colonies, then it is anti-Semitic to say that we cannot. It was as if the quest for equality were being reframed not as the right to be free from discrimination, but as the right to discriminate. Colonialism framed as reparations for genocide.

There is no difference whatever between anti-Semitism and the denial of Israel's statehood. Classical anti-Semitism denies the equal right of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people its lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination." New York Times, 1975

I am a Dalit in Khairlanji. A Pandit in the Kashmir valley. A Sikh in 1984. I am from the North East of India when I am in Munirka. I am a Muslim in Gujarat; a Christian in Kandhamal. A Bihari in Maharashtra. A Delhi-wallah in Chennai. A woman in North India. A Hindi-speaker in Assam. A Tamilian in MP. A villager in a big city. A confused man in an indifferent world. We're all minorities. We all suffer; we all face discrimination. It is only us resisting this parochialism when in the position of majoritarian power that makes us human. I hope that one day, I can just be an Indian in India - only then can I be me.

Reparations amount to a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it, and our federal government initiated, condoned, and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that would pay [reparations].

Any serious consideration of the world as it is around us today must tell us that maintaining common decency, much less peace and harmony, among living contemporaries is a major challenge, both among nations and within nations. To admit that we can do nothing about what happened among the dead is not to give up the struggle for a better world, but to concentrate our efforts where they have at least some hope of making things better for the living.

Though the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resented and resisted at every step of his progress. If he comes in ignorance, rags, and wretchedness, he conforms to the popular belief of his character, and in that character he is welcome. But if he shall come as a gentleman, a scholar, and a statesman, he is hailed as a contradiction to the national faith concerning his race, and his coming is resented as impudence. In the one case he may provoke contempt and derision, but in the other he is an affront to pride and provokes malice. Let him do what he will, there is at present, therefore, no escape for him. The color line meets him everywhere, and in a measure shuts him out from all respectable and profitable trades and callings.

What we are now witnessing in the 21st century is the fracture or complete breakdown of families, societies, and governments as a result of centuries of dehumanization that have taken a toll. More natural disasters (tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, etc.) merely uncover the reality of the national disasters we have created by granting sanctuary to dehumanization via the law.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?

WHITE NATIONALISTS & BLACK LIVES MATTER: The harder you swing the pendulum one way, the more violently it will swing back.

Talking frankly about race may make white people uncomfortable. Taking a stand to demonstrate the impact of race on law enforcement is difficult. Look what happened when a National Football League star, protesting discrimination, decided to kneel during the national anthem. Some understood the protest and the right to peacefully demonstrate pursuant to the First Amendment to our Constitution. Others have used the protest to divide us further and rally the white supremacist elements of their constituency. Yes, I am speaking to you, Mr. President, the principal antagonist of racial harmony.

Practically speaking, when more than 90 percent of women got married and divorce was rare, discrimination in favor of men at work meant discrimination in favor of their wives at home. When workplace discrimination worked in favor of women at home, no one called it sexism. Why? It was working for women. Only when discrimination switched from working for women to working against women (because more women were working) did it get called sexism. For example: During the years I was on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, the most resistant audiences I ever faced in the process of doing corporate workshops on equality in the workplace were not male executives—they were the wives of male executives.

The state does not oppose the freedom of people to express their particular cultural attachments, but nor does it nurture such expression—rather [...] it responds with 'benign neglect' [....] The members of ethnic and national groups are protected against discrimination and prejudice, and they are free to maintain whatever part of their ethnic heritage or identity they wish, consistent with the rights of others. But their efforts are purely private, and it is not the place of public agencies to attach legal identities or disabilities to cultural membership or ethnic identity. This separation of state and ethnicity precludes any legal or governmental recognition of ethnic groups, or any use of ethnic criteria in the distribution of rights, resources, and duties.

Many supporters believe--or want to believe--that Obama will be a transformative political leader in a transformative time. They eagerly await the flowering of peace and social justice policies that will open a new chapter in the abatement of "the structural inequalities that our nation's legacy of discrimination has left behind." Whether Obama, carrying the weight of race on his shoulders in a manner no other United States president ever has, will provide leadership and initiative on these issues is yet to be seen. At every opportunity, we should remind him to try.

Never trust the occultist who tells you that he is the head of a tradition, because if he were, in the first place, he would not tell the fact to the uninitiated, and in the second place he would in all probability be living in great seclusion and inaccessible to all but his immediate subordinates. If a man is a great artist he does not need to inform us of the fact; we shall know him by his pictures that are hung in the galleries of the nation, and we shall, moreover, find that he guards himself from casual acquaintances because of the inroads on his time to which his fame renders him liable. The more eminent a person, the harder he is to approach, not out of any spirit of pride and exclusiveness, but because so many people want to see him that discrimination has to be used in admitting them.

The First Amendment codifies a ‘negative liberty’; that is to say, it affords citizens the right to freedom from government interference. While this is essential, it means that it is ill-equipped to tackle many of the free speech battles of the digital age. Historically, censorship has been enacted by the state, but with the rise of social media as the de facto public square, big tech corporations now have dominion over the acceptable limits of popular discourse. We are rapidly moving into an age in which unelected plutocrats hold more collective power and influence than any national government, only without any of the democratic accountability. This is why the argument that private companies should be free to discriminate at will is no longer persuasive or viable. They claim to be platforms committed to the principle of free speech, and yet at the same time behave like publishers who seek to enforce limitations on the opinions that may be expressed.

But,” began the Zainichi North Korean man, “even if we know all that stuff, isn’t it pointless if the people discriminating against you don’t?” “What matters is that we know,” I said. “Those ignorant haters who discriminate based on nationality and ethnicity are pathetic. We need to educate ourselves and make ourselves stronger and forgive them. Not that I’m anywhere near that yet.

[T]he full and complete development of a country, the welfare of the world and the cause of peace require the maximum participation of women on equal terms with men in all fields." [Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979)]

Consciously or unconsciously, we carry around concepts of “us” and “them,” “right” and “wrong,” “worthy” and “unworthy.” In this framework, there’s not much room for a middle ground; everything is at one pole or another. When groups of people or whole nations get together around these concepts, they can become hugely magnified, which may result in large-scale suffering: discrimination, oppression, war.

To pay attention to the American political process, and what the candidates for this nation’s highest office have to say and not say about the issues that are of importance to them and thus we are to presume importance to the Nation, you would get the impression that the issue of race, that the issue of racism, that the issue of discrimination, and certainly that the issue of white racial privilege were non existent issues; that they were of really no importance, or that of very little importance, because you will not hear and have not heard any of the candidates for the presidency of the United States, in either party, of whatever political ideology, make this an issue. Yes,they talk about poverty and occasionally they talk about schooling and education. They talk about healthcare. They talk about all of those things, but not once have any of those candidates tried to directly connect the role that racism, the role that racial discrimination, the role that institutional racial oppression and white privilege play in regard to health care, in regard to housing, in regard to schooling. It is as if those issues exist in a vacuum and have no relationship to color, have no relationship to race, have no relationship to a history of racial subordination.

Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word “maladjusted.” This word is the ringing cry to modern child psychology. Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well‐adjusted life in order to avoid neurosis, schizophrenic personalities. But I say to you, my friends, as I move to my conclusion, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good‐will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self‐defeating effects of physical violence… In other words, I’m about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment‐‐men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos. Who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

Discrimination is the most polite word for abuse aka denying equal opportunity by anyone in power based on age, ancestry, color, disability (mental and physical), exercising the right to family care and medical leave, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, military or veteran status, national origin, political affiliation, race, religious creed, sex (includes pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and related medical conditions), and sexual orientation.

Intolerance is born of ideological allegiance.

U.S. history that while the nation fought its greatest war against the world’s worst racist, it maintained a segregated army abroad and a total system of discrimination at home.

Whatever country you live in, any law based on “glory” instead of real harm is dangerous. The glory of the nation, or the glory of the monarchy, or the glory of the superior race, or the glory of the church have been the cause of horrible wars and legally sanctioned discrimination. Any laws based solely on these glories should be morally denounced. They cause unnecessary harm.

The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts. For this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest. Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes. But these considerations, however powerfully they address themselves to your sensibility, are greatly outweighed by those which apply more immediately to your interest. Here every portion of our country finds the most commanding motives for carefully guarding and preserving the union of the whole.

Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America’s model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them? The

When groups feel threatened, they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them. In America today, every group feels this way to some extent. Whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, straight people and gay people, liberals and conservatives—all feel their groups are being attacked, bullied, persecuted, discriminated against. Of course, one group’s claims to feeling threatened and voiceless are often met by another group’s derision because it discounts their own feelings of persecution—but such is political tribalism.

It does not even seem to enter our minds that there might be some incongruity in praying to the God of peace, the God Who told us to love one another as He had loved us, Who warned us that they who took the sword would perish by it, and at the same time planning to annihilate not thousands but millions of civilians and soldiers, men, women and children without discrimination, even with the almost infallible certainty of inviting the same annihilation for ourselves! It may make sense for a sick man to pray for health and then take medicine, but I fail to see any sense at all in his praying for health and then drinking poison. WHEN I pray for peace I pray God to pacify not only the Russians and the Chinese but above all my own nation and myself. When I pray for peace I pray to be protected not only from the Reds but also from the folly and blindness of my own country. When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my country may cease to want war, but above all that my own country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable. In other words, when I pray for peace I am not just praying that the Russians will give up without a struggle and let us have our own way. I am praying that both we and the Russians may somehow be restored to sanity and learn how to work out our problems, as best we can, together, instead of preparing for global suicide.

Issues such as gender discrimination, racism, and national chauvinism must be recast not only as cultural and social regressions but as evidence of the ills produced by hierarchy. A growing public awareness must be fostered in order to recognize that oppression includes not only exploitation but also domination, and that it is based not only on economic causes but on cultural particularisms that divide people according to sexual, ethnic, and similar traits.

Liberals like to complain that, the twice-elected President Obama notwithstanding, we are not a “post-racial” society. The reality is that they wouldn’t have it any other way. Race consciousness helps cohere the political left, and black liberalism’s main agenda is keeping race front and center in our national conversations. That’s why, for example, much more common black-on-black crimes take a back seat to much less common white-on-black crimes. The last thing that organizations like the NAACP want is for America to get “beyond” race. In their view, racial discrimination in one form or another remains a significant barrier to black progress, and government action is the best solution.

Ethical AI systems must learn not to discriminate or manipulate anyone based on race, color, religion, gender, age, national origin, marital status, social status, genetics, or medical information. Must understand its own misuse or misconduct limits and recertification mechanisms.

In this sense, Hitler´s painting supports [Hannah] Arendt´s theory of National Socialism--that it was defined by its banality and lack of empathy. The Nazis relied on the ability of people not to imagine themselves in someone else´s shoes. The lack of a connection was very much the point.

And there’s one other matter I must raise. The epidemic of domestic sexual violence that lacerates the soul of South Africa is mirrored in the pattern of grotesque raping in areas of outright conflict from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in areas of contested electoral turbulence from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Inevitably, a certain percentage of the rapes transmits the AIDS virus. We don’t know how high that percentage is. We know only that women are subjected to the most dreadful double jeopardy. The point must also be made that there’s no such thing as the enjoyment of good health for women who live in constant fear of rape. Countless strong women survive the sexual assaults that occur in the millions every year, but every rape leaves a scar; no one ever fully heals. This business of discrimination against and oppression of women is the world’s most poisonous curse. Nowhere is it felt with greater catastrophic force than in the AIDS pandemic. This audience knows the statistics full well: you’ve chronicled them, you’ve measured them, the epidemiologists amongst you have disaggregated them. What has to happen, with one unified voice, is that the scientific community tells the political community that it must understand one incontrovertible fact of health: bringing an end to sexual violence is a vital component in bringing an end to AIDS. The brave groups of women who dare to speak up on the ground, in country after country, should not have to wage this fight in despairing and lonely isolation. They should hear the voices of scientific thunder. You understand the connections between violence against women and vulnerability to the virus. No one can challenge your understanding. Use it, I beg you, use it.

Dominated by Zionism's particular concept of nationality, the State of Israel still refuses, sixty years after its establishment, to see itself as a republic that serves its citizens. One quarter of the citizens are not categorized as Jews, and the laws of the state imply that Israel is not their state nor do they own it. The state has also avoided integrating the local inhabitants into the superculture it has created, and has instead deliberately excluded them. Israel has also refused to be a consociational democracy (like Switzerland or Belgium) or a multicultural democracy (like Great Britain or the Netherlands)—that is to say, a state that accepts its diversity while serving its inhabitants. Instead, Israel insists on seeing itself as a Jewish state belonging to all the Jews in the world, even though they are no longer persecuted refugees but full citizens of the countries in which they choose to reside. The excuse for this grave violation of a basic principle of modern democracy, and for the preservation of an unbridled ethnocracy that grossly discriminates against certain of its citizens, rests on the active myth of an eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land.

But there was a more recent author and public figure whose work spoke to the core of a new set of issues I was struggling with: the Bronx's own Colin Powell. His book, My American Journey, helped me harmonize my understanding of America's history and my aspiration to serve her in uniform. In his autobiography he talked about going to the Woolworth's in Columbus, Georgia, and being able to shop but not eat there. He talked about how black GIs during World War II had more freedoms when stationed in Germany than back in the country they fought for. But he embraced the progress this nation made and the military's role in helping that change to come about. Colin Powell could have been justifiably angry, but he wasn't. He was thankful. I read and reread one section in particular: The Army was living the democratic ideal ahead of the rest of America. Beginning in the fifties, less discrimination, a truer merit system, and leveler playing fields existed inside the gates of our military posts more than in any Southern city hall or Northern corporation. The Army, therefore, made it easier for me to love my country, with all its flaws, and to serve her with all of my heart." -The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (p. 131)

The journey to reckon with our nation's searing history of racial hatred, intolerance, and discrimination is ongoing, and there are no neutrals in that struggle. The shadow cast by Joseph Paul Franklin and his like is long and dark, so the sunlight to eradicate it must be even brighter and stronger. [p. 290]

A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centers, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy - that we must take care of our own first, that migrants are out to destroy "our way of life" - will be marshaled to rationalize these monstrous decisions. We are making this rationalization already, if only implicitly. Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst, whether they are abandoned on the rooftops of New Orleans during hurricane Katrina or are among the thirty-six million who, according to the United Nations, are facing hunger due to drought in souther and east Africa.

the Reformed Christian has never believed that America is a Christian nation and that, accordingly, our social institutions and formations, though blemished here and there, are fundamentally in accord with God's will. But neither has she agreed with those Christians who hold that our social institutions and formations are fundamentally corrupt and that the duty of the Christian is to withdraw. Normative discrimination is what she has always regarded as the appropriate stance, coupled with the attempt, once the discrimination has been made, to change what is wrong when that proves possible, to keep discontent alive when change proves not possible, and always to be grateful for what is good. In short, to act redemptively. While praying the prayer, "Thy kingdom come," to join God's cause of struggling against all that resists and falls short of God's will and longing for creation, thus to acknowledge the rightful, and ultimately effective, rule of Jesus Christ over every square inch of creation.

We cannot too strongly condemn the un-Christian attitude of certain otherwise progressive nations in their discriminations against the Jews, who have been among the strongest supporters of the League, and who will continue to prosper and to be recognized as fully Americanized, though only so long as they continue to support our ideals.

In North Korea, the state built an education system to inculcate propaganda, but was unable to prevent famine. In colonial Latin America, the state focused on coercing indigenous peoples. In neither type of society was there a level playing field or an unbiased legal system. In North Korea, the legal system is an arm of the ruling Communist Party, and in Latin America it was a tool of discrimination against the mass of people. We call such institutions, which have opposite properties to those we call inclusive, extractive economic institutions—extractive because such institutions are designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.

It was now pointed out that the black male child, even in a black school using white textbooks, could early come to the conclusion that all the heroes in history were white men. Furthermore, with the exception of nationally known black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, and others, the black male child frequently saw the adult black male as ineffectual and defeated. The old picture of the white man leading the black man by the hand toward the solution to his problems again gave the black male child a view of the adult black male as something not worth becoming, and killed his spirit and his will to become an adult, problem-solving individual.

If Americans had to discriminate directly against other people’s children, I believe most citizens would find this morally abhorrent. Denial, in an active sense, of other people’s children is, however, rarely necessary in this nation. Inequality is mediated for us by a taxing system that most people do not fully understand and seldom scrutinize.

Richard Vedder and Lowell Galloway suggest that while other factors may have been at work, New Deal interventions (Davis-Bacon Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, National Labor Relations Act, Social Security Act, and other labor legislation) during the 1930s and later cannot be easily dismissed as a major factor in reducing work opportunities for blacks.

A final point is the fact that discrimination based on presumed inborn and immutable characteristics (race) tends to be stronger and more inflexible than ethnic discrimination which is not based on ‘racial’ differences. Members of a presumed race cannot change their assumed inherited traits, while ethnic groups can change their culture and, ultimately,

Put differently, it is the interaction of the welfare state with differing existing cultures in the population which produces varying socioeconomic outcomes, whether within nations or between nations. But here, as in other contexts, the invincible fallacy often trumps the hardest facts, so that very different people are treated as if they were the same.

What we are now witnessing in the 21st century is the fracture or complete breakdown of families, societies, and governments as a result of centuries of dehumanization that have taken a toll. More natural disasters (tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, etc.) merely uncover the reality of the national disasters we have created by grandting sanctuary to dehumanization via the law.

There is a similar system of discrimination, extending far beyond a small geographical region to the entire globe; it touches every nation, perpetuating and expanding the trafficking in human slaves, body mutilation, and even legitimized murder on a massive scale. This system is based on the presumption that men and boys are superior to women and girls, and it is supported by some male religious leaders who distort the Holy Bible, the Koran, and other sacred texts to perpetuate their claim that females are, in some basic ways, inferior to them, unqualified to serve God on equal terms. Many men disagree but remain quiet in order to enjoy the benefits of their dominant status. This false premise provides a justification for sexual discrimination in almost every realm of secular and religious life.

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens' Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

Across history, racist power has produced racist ideas about the racialized ethnic groups in its colonial sphere and ranked them—across the globe and within their own nations. The history of the United States offers a parade of intra-racial ethnic power relationships: Anglo-Saxons discriminating against Irish Catholics and Jews; Cuban immigrants being privileged over Mexican immigrants; the model-minority construction that includes East Asians and excludes Muslims from South Asia. It’s a history that began with early European colonizers referring to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole as the “Five Civilized Tribes” of Native Americans, as compared to other “wild” tribes. This ranking of racialized ethnic groups within the ranking of the races creates a racial-ethnic hierarchy, a ladder of ethnic racism within the larger schema of racism.

An Oath for the Youth by Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam I will have a goal and work hard to achieve that goal. I realize that small aim is a crime. I will work with integrity and succeed with integrity. I will be a good member of my family, society, the nation and the world. I will always try to save or better someone’s life, without any discrimination of caste, creed, language, religion or state. Wherever I am, a thought will always come to my mind. That is, what can I give?

For too long the depth of racism in American life has been underestimated. The surgery to extract it is necessarily complex and detailed. As a beginning it is important to X-ray our history and reveal the full extent of the disease. The strands of prejudice toward Negroes are tightly wound around the American character. The prejudice has been nourished by the doctrine of race inferiority. Yet to focus upon the Negro alone as the "inferior race" of American myth is to miss the broader dimensions of the evil. Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations. This is in sharp contrast to many nations south of the border, which assimilated their Indians, respected their culture, and elevated many of them to high position. It was upon this massive base of racism that the prejudice toward the nonwhite was readily built, and found rapid growth. This long-standing racist ideology has corrupted and diminished our democratic ideals. It is this tangled web of prejudice from which many Americans now seek to liberate themselves, without realizing how deeply it has been woven into their consciousness.

Sadly, not all veterans had equal access to an education, even under the GI Bill’s amendments. Although no provision prevented African American and female veterans from securing an education under the bill, these veterans returned to a nation that still endorsed segregated schools and largely believed a woman’s place was in the home. For African American veterans, educational opportunities were limited. In the words of historian Christopher P. Loss, “Legalized segregation denied most black veterans admission into the nation’s elite, overwhelmingly white universities, and insufficient capacity at the all-black schools they could attend failed to match black veterans’ demand.” The number of African American students at U.S. colleges and universities tripled between 1940 and 1950, but many prospective students were turned away because of their race. For those African Americans who did earn a degree under the GI Bill, employment discrimination prevented them from gaining positions commensurate with their education. Many African American college graduates were offered low-level jobs that they could have secured without any education. Almost a decade elapsed between V-J Day and the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregated schools. It would take another decade after Brown for the civil rights movement to fully develop and for public schools to make significant strides in integrating.

Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change. In the last 60 years the world’s most powerful countries have given up long-held cherished values previously central to their national image, while holding on to other values. Britain and France abandoned their centuries-old role as independently acting world powers; Japan abandoned its military tradition and armed forces; and Russia abandoned its long experiment with communism. The United States has retreated substantially (but hardly completely) from its former values of legalized racial discrimination, legalized homophobia, a subordinate role of women, and sexual repression. Australia is now reevaluating its status as a rural farming society with British identity. Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win their gambles.

nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Eisenhower accepted and used the power of television. Stevenson felt obliged to critique it. In an article for Fortune magazine published shortly after the campaign, Stevenson worried that television was corrupting the ability of the body politic to think critically. “The extensions of our senses, which we find so fascinating, are not adding to the discriminations of our minds, since we need increasingly to take the reading of a needle on a dial to discover whether we think something is good or bad, right or wrong,” he wrote.

The Zionist version of justice said to Western powers: If you could establish your empires and your settler colonial nations through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft, then it is discrimination to say that we cannot. If you cleared your land of its Indigenous inhabitants, or did so in your colonies, then it is anti-Semitic to say that we cannot. It was as if the quest for equality were being reframed not as the right to be free from discrimination, but as the right to discriminate. Colonialism framed as reparations for genocide.

There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day or pointing to the election of Barack Obama, and in the process doing further damage to the traumatized through a kind of historical gaslighting.

The term ‘political correctness’ has evolved out of the Marxist and Freudian philosophies of the 1930s to become a tool for multicultural-ism, multisexualism, multitheism, and multi-anythingism. It was created to discourage bias and prejudiced thinking that discriminates against an individual or group. It has become society’s way of not offending anyone, whether it is an individual, a group, or a nation. In many instances, however, it is a simple, disarming way of ignoring or deflecting the truth about a situation. Today, the use of political correctness has become so abused that anyone who voices his or her opinion contrary to ‘politically correct think’ is immediately tagged with some form of disparaging label, such as racist and bigot. This exploitation has gotten so out of control that this name-calling accusation is used as a simple and mindless means to manipulate academic, social, or political discussion. The result is a social paranoia which discourages free thought and expression. It’s like living in a totalitarian state in which you are afraid to say what you think. Now who wants to suffer that? So people keep quiet. Their opinions are held captive to fear. How handy for the Islamo-fascists, the American-hating, Jew-killing, Israel-destroying, women-abusing, multireligious-intolerant Muslims. Oh! Excuse me. Did I say something not quite PC? This social paranoia is similar to the attitude that developed in the late 1980s and 1990s, when people became so concerned about children’s self-esteem that failure could not be acknowledged or misbehavior corrected. ‘Now, let’s not hurt their feelings’ was the standard approach. This degree of concern led to teachers giving passing grades for poor performance and youth sport activities where no one kept score. And what has been the fallout of all that psychobabble? High school kids who can’t read their diploma or make change for a dollar, internationally embarrassing scholastic performance scores, and young adults ill equipped to face the competitive lifestyle the world has to offer. They are left watching the television show The Apprentice, not competing to be an apprentice. America got itself into a mess by not upholding the high standards and expectations it once had, instead giving in to mediocrity; and we’re getting into a mess now with political correctness.

6) The National General Assembly of the people of Cuba - confident that it is expressing the general opinion of the peoples of Latin America - affirms that democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy; with discrimination against the Negro; with disturbances by the Ku Klux Klan; nor with the persecution that drove scientists like Oppenheimer from their posts, deprived the world for years of the marvelous voice of Paul Robeson, held prisoner in his own country, and sent the Rosenbergs to their death against the protests of a shocked world including the appeals of many governments and of Pope Pius XII.

When this parable has been put to white students, most seemed to feel that it would not be out of place to ask for $1 million for each future year they would be living as a black American. And this calculation conveys, as well as anything, the value that white people place on their own skin. Indeed, to be white is to possess a gift whose value can be appreciated only after it has been taken away. And why ask for so large a sum? Surely this needs no detailing. The money would be used, as best it could, to buy protection from the discriminations and dangers white people know they would face once they were perceived to be black.

For hundreds of years the quiet sobbing of an oppressed people had been unheard by millions of white Americans—the bitterness of the Negroes' lives remote and unfelt except by a sensitive few. Suddenly last summer the silence was broken. The lament became a shout and then a roar and for months no American, white or Negro, was insulated or unaware. The stride toward freedom lengthened and accelerated into a gallop, while the whole nation looked on. White America was forced to face the ugly facts of life as the Negro thrust himself into the consciousness of the country, and dramatized his grievances on a thousand brightly lighted stages.

The savarnas constructed all sorts of mythologies: of chivalry, of ideals. What was the outcome? A defeated social order in the clutches of hopelessness, poverty, illiteracy, narrow-mindedness, religious inertia, and priestocracy, a social order embroiled in ritualism, which, fragmented, was repeatedly defeated by the Greeks, Shakas, Huns, Afghans, Moghuls, French, and English. Yet in the name of their valor and their greatness, savarnas kept hitting the weak and the helpless. Kept burning homes. Kept insulting women and raping them. To drown in self-praise and turn away from the truth, to not learn from history—what sort of a nation-building are they dreaming of?

Furthermore, discriminating against Jews and against social and political ‘undesirables’ made ‘mainstream’ Germans feel more integrated; those Germans who met the right social, political and, above all, racial criteria could feel part of a ‘national community’ and enjoy far greater self-confidence than they had a few years previously. In the words of Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, ‘it is no accident that Germans of that generation tend to describe the Third Reich, up until Germany’s military defeat at Stalingrad, as a “great time”. Such people were categorically incapable of experiencing the exclusion, persecution, and dispossession of others for what they were.

Palestinians make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, and despite the fact that they live in their own homeland, Israel relegates them to second- or even third-class status. One of my classmates had discovered that more than fifty laws discriminated against the Palestinian citizens of Israel based solely on their ethnicity. Another discussed how government resources were disproportionately directed to Jews, leaving the Palestinians to suffer the worst living standards in Israeli society, with Palestinian children’s schools receiving only a fraction of the government spending given to Jewish schools. They also talked about how difficult it was for Palestinians to obtain land for a home, business, or agriculture because over 90 percent of the land in Israel was owned either by the state or by quasigovernmental agencies (like the Jewish National Fund) that discriminated against Palestinians. And they lamented the fact that if they or any of their relatives chose to marry a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, they couldn’t pass on their Israeli citizenship to their spouse, thanks to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. Their spouse wouldn’t even be able to gain residency status to live with them inside Israel. This meant they’d be forced to leave Israel and separate from their family in order to live with their spouse.

Most people in Europe in 1950 held views that seventy years later would be regarded as anathema. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (arising from their catastrophic breach during the Second World War) had been adopted by the United Nations as recently as December 1948, but there was little popular understanding of what it meant in practice. Racist views and blatant racial discrimination were widely accepted and scarcely seen as remarkable. Few people of skin colours other than white lived in European countries. Capital punishment was still in existence, and executions were routinely carried out for people found guilty of the worst crimes. Homosexuality remained a criminal offence. Abortion was illegal. The influence of the Christian churches was profound, and attendance at church services still relatively high. By the time post-war children approached old age, human rights were taken for granted (however imperfect the practice), holding racist views was among the worst of social stigmas (though less so in Eastern and Southern than in Western Europe), multicultural societies were the norm, capital punishment had disappeared from Europe, gay marriage and legal abortion were widely accepted, and the role of the Christian churches had diminished greatly (though the spread of mosques, a feature of modern European cities almost wholly unknown in 1950, testified to the importance of religion among Muslim minorities).

Among apologists for Christian nationalism today, the favored myth is that the movement represents an extension of the abolitionism of the nineteenth century and perhaps of the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, too. Many antiabortion activists self-consciously identify themselves as the new abolitionists. Mainstream conservatives who lament that the evangelicals who form Trump’s most fervent supporters have ‘lost their way’ suggest that they have betrayed their roots in the movements that fought for the abolition of slavery and the end of discrimination. But the truth is that today’s Christian nationalism did not emerge out of the religious movement that opposed such rigid hierarchies. It came from the one that promoted them — with the Bible in one hand and a whip in the other.

According to Vedder and Galloway, prior to the enactment of the Davis-Bacon Act, black and white construction unemployment registered similar levels. After the enactment of the Davis-Bacon Act, however, black unemployment rose relative to that of whites.[31] Vedder and Galloway also argue that 1930 to 1950 was a period of unprecedented and rapidly increasing government intervention in the economy. This period saw enactment of the bulk of legislation restraining the setting of private wage, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act, Davis-Bacon Act, Walsh-Healey Act, and National Labor Relations Act. The Social Security Act also played a role, forcing employers to pay for a newly imposed fringe benefit.[32] Vedder and Galloway also note that this period saw a rapid increase in the black/white unemployment ratio.

minimizes the trauma, either by shifting blame for it onto fringe actors of the present (“These acts don’t represent who we are”), relative values of the times (“Everyone back then believed in slavery”), or, worst, back onto the traumatized (“They are responsible for themselves”). There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day or pointing to the election of Barack Obama, and in the process doing further damage to the traumatized through a kind of historical gaslighting.

National Reserve (The Sonnet) Every nation has its Netanyahu, Somewhere they're called Trump, Somewhere they are Recep Erdoğan, Somewhere they are Meloni or Modi, Somewhere they're called Imran Khan. Thus Christ becomes a vessel of hate, Koran is used to peddle division. Saffron substitutes the color of blood, Discrimination becomes the new tradition. Somewhere they cut Islam from curriculum, Somewhere they convert museum into mosque, Somewhere they erase black history - it's all part-n-parcel of the same nationalist muck. Rip the mask of a nationalist patriot, You'll find dormant a homicidal maniac. Nationalism has no religion or ethnicity, Only appearance changes, not the nut. Beware of these nutjobs of nationalism, selling you the jungle wrapped in tradition! If you don't vote them off their throne asap, they'll turn a free nation into reservation.

What the turbulent months of the campaign and the election revealed most of all, I think, was that the American people were voicing a profound demand for change. On the one hand, the Humphrey people were demanding a Marshall Plan for our diseased cities and an economic solution to our social problems. The Nixon and Wallace supporters, on the other hand, were making their own limited demands for change. They wanted more "law and order," to be achieved not through federal spending but through police, Mace, and the National Guard. We must recognize and accept the demand for change, but now we must struggle to give it a progressive direction. For the immediate agenda, I would make four proposals. First, the Electoral College should be eliminated. It is archaic, undemocratic, and potentially very dangerous. Had Nixon not achieved a majority of the electoral votes, Wallace might have been in the position to choose and influence our next President. A shift of only 46,000 votes in the states of Alaska, Delaware, New Jersey, and Missouri would have brought us to that impasse. We should do away with this system, which can give a minority and reactionary candidate so much power and replace it with one that provides for the popular election of the President. It is to be hoped that a reform bill to this effect will emerge from the hearings that will soon be conducted by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana. Second, a simplified national registration law should be passed that provides for universal permanent registration and an end to residence requirements. Our present system discriminates against the poor who are always underregistered, often because they must frequently relocate their residence, either in search of better employment and living conditions or as a result of such poorly planned programs as urban renewal (which has been called Negro removal). Third, the cost of the presidential campaigns should come from the public treasury and not from private individuals. Nixon, who had the backing of wealthy corporate executives, spent $21 million on his campaign. Humphrey's expenditures totaled only $9.7 million. A system so heavily biased in favor of the rich cannot rightly be called democratic. And finally, we must maintain order in our public meetings. It was disgraceful that each candidate, for both the presidency and the vice-presidency, had to be surrounded by cordons of police in order to address an audience. And even then, hecklers were able to drown him out. There is no possibility for rational discourse, a prerequisite for democracy, under such conditions. If we are to have civility in our civil life, we must not permit a minority to disrupt our public gatherings.

Poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and social activist Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) would come to be known as the father of Islamic radicalism. Born in Upper Egypt, he had, like al-Banna, moved to Cairo during the turbulent 1920s. After a brief stint in the Ministry of Education, Qutb traveled to the United States in 1948 to research its educational system. What he discovered was a nation committed to individual freedom, yet “devoid of human sympathy and responsibility … except under the force of law.” He was disgusted by what he saw as the country’s “materialistic attitude” and its “evil and fanatical racial discrimination,” both of which he blamed on the West’s compulsion to pull “religion apart from common life.” Qutb was equally frightened at the rapid spread of Western cultural hegemony in the developing countries of the Middle East and North Africa, a phenomenon that the Iranian social critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Qutb’s contemporary, dubbed Gharbzadeghi, or “Westoxification.” Upon

As Angela Davis has reminded us so poignantly in her discussion of democracy under capitalism: “We know that there is a glaring incongruity between democracy and the capitalist economy which is the source of our ills. Regardless of all rhetoric to the contrary, the people are not the ultimate matrix of the laws and the system which govern them—certainly not black people and other nationally oppressed people, but not even the mass of whites. The people do not exercise decisive control over the determining factors of their lives.” There is reason to question, moreover, whether capitalist democracy favors or fuels highly reprehensible political activities, if it be colonialism and neocolonialism, the rise to power of certain forms of fascism, racial segregation and sexist discrimination (de jure or de facto), the upsurge of what Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism, or the rise of political schemers like George W. Bush and Silvio Berlusconi. It must be noted that the history of institutionalized democracy, as we know it, instead of being the history of a simple ascension toward the summum bonum of politics in general, is in fact punctuated by such practices.

The nations whose chief support was in the chase, whose chief interest was in the battle, whose chief pleasure was in the banquet, would take small care respecting the shapes of leaves and flowers; and notice little in the forms of the forest trees which sheltered them, except the signs indicative of the wood which would make the toughest lance, the closest roof, or the clearest fire. The affectionate observation of the grace and outward character of vegetation is the sure sign of a more tranquil and gentle existence, sustained by the gifts, and gladdened by the splendour, of the earth. In that careful distinction of species, and richness of delicate and undisturbed organisation, which characterise the Gothic design, there is the history of rural and thoughtful life, influenced by habitual tenderness, and devoted to subtle inquiry; and every discriminating and delicate touch of the chisel, as it rounds the petal or guides the branch, is a prophecy of the development of the entire body of the natural sciences, beginning with that of medicine, of the recovery of literature, and the establishment of the most necessary principles of domestic wisdom and national peace.

The central premise of racism, which distinguishes it from ethnic prejudice, is the notion of an ordered hierarchy of races in which some are superior to others. The superior race is assumed to enjoy the right to rule others because of its inherent qualities. Besides superiority, racism also connotes the idea of immutability, thought once to reside in the blood and now in the genes. Racists are concerned about intermarriage (“the purity of the blood”) lest it erode the basis of their race’s superiority. Since quality is seen as biologically inherent, the racist’s higher status can never be challenged, and inferior races can never redeem themselves. The notion of inherent superiority, which is generally absent from mere ethnic prejudice, is held to justify unlimited abuse of races held to be inferior, from social discrimination to annihilation. “The essence of racism is that it regards individuals as superior or inferior because they are imagined to share physical, mental and moral attributes with the group to which they are deemed to belong, and it is assumed that they cannot change these traits individually,” writes the historian Benjamin Isaac.2 It’s not surprising that the notion of racial superiority emerged in the 19th century, after European nations had established colonies in much of the world and sought a theoretical justification of their dominion over others.

Statistical discrimination explains why the police in the United States justify stopping black drivers more often. And how the Hindu majoritarian government of the state of Uttar Pradesh recently explained why so many of the people “accidentally” killed by the state police (in what are called “encounter deaths”) are Muslim. There are more blacks and Muslims among criminals. In other words, what looks like naked racism does not have to be that; it can be the result of targeting some characteristic (drug dealing, criminality) that happens to be correlated with race or religion. So statistical discrimination, rather than old-fashioned prejudice—what economists call taste-based discrimination—may be the cause. The end result is the same if you are black or Muslim, though. A recent study on the impact of “ban the box” (BTB) policies on the rate of unemployment of young black men provides a compelling demonstration of statistical discrimination. BTB policies restrict employers from using application forms where there is a box that needs to be checked if you have a criminal conviction. Twenty-three states have adopted these policies in the hope of raising employment among young black men, who are much more likely to have a conviction than others and whose unemployment rate is double the national average.31 To test the effect of these policies, two researchers sent fifteen thousand fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City, just before and right after the states of New York and New Jersey implemented the BTB policy.32 They manipulated the perception of race by using typically white or typically African American first names on the résumés. Whenever a job posting required indicating whether or not the applicant had a prior felony conviction, they also randomized whether he or she had one. They found, as many others before them, clear discrimination against blacks in general: white “applicants” received about 23 percent more callbacks than black applicants with the same résumé. Unsurprisingly, among employers who asked about criminal convictions before the ban, there was a very large effect of having a felony conviction: applicants without a felony conviction were 62 percent more likely to be called back than those with a conviction but an otherwise identical résumé, an effect similar for whites and blacks. The most surprising finding, however, was that the BTB policy substantially increased racial disparities in callbacks. White applicants to BTB-affected employers received 7 percent more callbacks than similar black applicants before BTB. After BTB, this gap grew to 43 percent. The reason was that without the actual information about convictions, the employers assumed all black applicants were more likely to have a conviction. In other words, the BTB policy led employers to rely on race to predict criminality, which is of course statistical discrimination.

The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation's capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across America. These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color. That is not what one would guess, however, when entering our nation's prisons and jails, which are over-flowing with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men. And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These young men are part of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society.

Now we all should seek to live a well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things. I call upon you to be as maladjusted as Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried out in words that echo across the generation, 'Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.' As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out, 'All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to gout and change our world and our civilization. And then we will be able to move from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them. Donald Trump did not trigger this militant turn; his rise was symptomatic of a long-standing condition. Survey data reveal the stark contours of the contemporary evangelical worldview. More than any other religious demographic in America, white evangelical Protestants support preemptive war, condone the use of torture, and favor the death penalty. They are more likely than members of other faith groups to own a gun, to believe citizens should be allowed to carry guns in most places, and to feel safer with a firearm around. White evangelicals are more opposed to immigration reform and have more negative views of immigrants than any other religious demographic; two-thirds support Trump’s border wall. Sixty-eight percent of white evangelical Protestants—more than any other demographic—do not think that the United States has a responsibility to accept refugees. More than half of white evangelical Protestants think a majority nonwhite US population would be a negative development. White evangelicals are considerably more likely than others to believe that Islam encourages violence, to refuse to see Islam as “part of mainstream American society,” and to perceive “natural conflict between Islam and democracy.” At the same time, white evangelicals believe that Christians in America face more discrimination than Muslims. White evangelicals are significantly more authoritarian than other religious groups, and they express confidence in their religious leaders at much higher rates than do members of other faiths.

It should be clear by now that whatever Americans say about diversity, it is not a strength. If it were a strength, Americans would practice it spontaneously. It would not require “diversity management” or anti-discrimination laws. Nor would it require constant reminders of how wonderful it is. It takes no exhortations for us to appreciate things that are truly desirable: indoor plumbing, vacations, modern medicine, friendship, or cheaper gasoline. [W]hen they are free to do so, most people avoid diversity. The scientific evidence suggests why: Human beings appear to have deeply-rooted tribal instincts. They seem to prefer to live in homogeneous communities rather than endure the tension and conflict that arise from differences. If the goal of building a diverse society conflicts with some aspect of our nature, it will be very difficult to achieve. As Horace wrote in the Epistles, “Though you drive Nature out with a pitchfork, she will ever find her way back.” Some intellectuals and bohemians profess to enjoy diversity, but they appear to be a minority. Why do we insist that diversity is a strength when it is not? In the 1950s and 1960s, when segregation was being dismantled, many people believed full integration would be achieved within a generation. At that time, there were few Hispanics or Asians but with a population of blacks and whites, the United States could be described as “diverse.” It seemed vastly more forward-looking to think of this as an advantage to be cultivated rather than a weakness to be endured. Our country also seemed to be embarking on a morally superior course. Human history is the history of warfare—between nations, tribes, and religions —and many Americans believed that reconciliation between blacks and whites would lead to a new era of inclusiveness for all peoples of the world. After the immigration reforms of 1965 opened the United States to large numbers of non- Europeans, our country became more diverse than anyone in the 1950s would have imagined. Diversity often led to conflict, but it would have been a repudiation of the civil rights movement to conclude that diversity was a weakness. Americans are proud of their country and do not like to think it may have made a serious mistake. As examples of ethnic and racial tension continued to accumulate, and as the civil rights vision of effortless integration faded, there were strong ideological and even patriotic reasons to downplay or deny what was happening, or at least to hope that exhortations to “celebrate diversity” would turn what was proving to be a problem into an advantage. To criticize diversity raises the intolerable possibility that the United States has been acting on mistaken assumptions for half a century. To talk glowingly about diversity therefore became a form of cheerleading for America. It even became common to say that diversity was our greatest strength—something that would have astonished any American from the colonial era through the 1950s. There is so much emotional capital invested in the civil-rights-era goals of racial equality and harmony that virtually any critique of its assumptions is intolerable. To point out the obvious— that diversity brings conflict—is to question sacred assumptions about the ultimate insignificance of race. Nations are at their most sensitive and irrational where they are weakest. It is precisely because it is so easy to point out the weaknesses of diversity that any attempt to do so must be countered, not by specifying diversity’s strengths—which no one can do—but with accusations of racism.

In any case the slave is nobler than his modern masters—the bourgeoisie. It is a sign of the inferiority of nineteenth century culture that the man of money should be the object of so much worship and envy. But these business men too are slaves, puppets of routine, victims of busy-ness; they have no time for new ideas; thinking is taboo among them, and the joys of the intellect are beyond their reach. Hence their restless and perpetual search for “happiness,” their great houses which are never homes, their vulgar luxury without taste, their picture-galleries of “originals,” with cost attached, their sensual amusements that dull rather than refresh or stimulate the mind. “Look at these superfluous! They acquire riches and become poorer thereby”; they accept all the restraints of aristocracy without its compensating access to the kingdom of the mind. “See how they climb, these swift apes! They climb over one another, and thus drag themselves into the mud and depths... The stench of shop-keepers, the wriggling of ambition, the evil breath.” There is no use in such men having wealth, for they cannot give it dignity by noble use, by the discriminating patronage of letters or the arts. “Only a man of intellect should hold property”; others think of property as an end in itself, and pursue it more and more recklessly,—look at “the present madness of nations, which desire above all to produce as much as possible, and to be as rich as possible.” At last man becomes a bird of prey: “they live in ambush for one another; they obtain things from each other by lying in wait. That is called by them good neighborliness... They seek the smallest profits out of every sort of rubbish.” “Today, mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement on piratical morality—buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest.” And these men cry out for laissez-faire, to be let alone,—these very men who most need supervision and control.

First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South discriminatingly. The present generation of Southerners are not responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it. Furthermore, to no class is the indiscriminate endorsement of the recent course of the South toward Negroes more nauseating than to the best thought of the South. The South is not “solid’; it is a land in the ferment of social change, wherein forces of all kinds are fighting for supremacy; and to praise the ill the South is today perpetrating is just as wrong as to condemn the good. Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South needs,—needs it for the sake of her own white sons and daughters, and for the insurance of robust, healthy mental and moral development. Today even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others—usually the sons of the masters—wish to help him to rise. National opinion has enabled this last class to maintain the Negro common schools, and to protect the Negro partially in property, life, and limb. Through the pressure of the money-makers, the Negro is in danger of being reduced to semi-slavery, especially in the country districts; the workingmen, and those of the educated who fear the Negro, have united to disfranchise him, and some have urged his deportation; while the passions of the ignorant are easily aroused to lynch and abuse any black man. To praise this intricate whirl of thought and prejudice is nonsense; to inveigh indiscriminately against “the South” is unjust; but to use the same breath in praising Governor Aycock, exposing Senator Morgan, arguing with Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, and denouncing Senator Ben Tillman, is not only sane, but the imperative duty of thinking black men.

Imagine you are Emma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single African American mother of two who was arrested as part of a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas.1 All but one of the people arrested were African American. You are innocent. After a week in jail, you have no one to care for your two small children and are eager to get home. Your court-appointed attorney urges you to plead guilty to a drug distribution charge, saying the prosecutor has offered probation. You refuse, steadfastly proclaiming your innocence. Finally, after almost a month in jail, you decide to plead guilty so you can return home to your children. Unwilling to risk a trial and years of imprisonment, you are sentenced to ten years probation and ordered to pay $1,000 in fines, as well as court and probation costs. You are also now branded a drug felon. You are no longer eligible for food stamps; you may be discriminated against in employment; you cannot vote for at least twelve years; and you are about to be evicted from public housing. Once homeless, your children will be taken from you and put in foster care. A judge eventually dismisses all cases against the defendants who did not plead guilty. At trial, the judge finds that the entire sweep was based on the testimony of a single informant who lied to the prosecution. You, however, are still a drug felon, homeless, and desperate to regain custody of your children. Now place yourself in the shoes of Clifford Runoalds, another African American victim of the Hearne drug bust.2 You returned home to Bryan, Texas, to attend the funeral of your eighteen-month-old daughter. Before the funeral services begin, the police show up and handcuff you. You beg the officers to let you take one last look at your daughter before she is buried. The police refuse. You are told by prosecutors that you are needed to testify against one of the defendants in a recent drug bust. You deny witnessing any drug transaction; you don’t know what they are talking about. Because of your refusal to cooperate, you are indicted on felony charges. After a month of being held in jail, the charges against you are dropped. You are technically free, but as a result of your arrest and period of incarceration, you lose your job, your apartment, your furniture, and your car. Not to mention the chance to say good-bye to your baby girl. This is the War on Drugs. The brutal stories described above are not isolated incidents, nor are the racial identities of Emma Faye Stewart and Clifford Runoalds random or accidental. In every state across our nation, African Americans—particularly in the poorest neighborhoods—are subjected to tactics and practices that would result in public outrage and scandal if committed in middle-class white neighborhoods.

You are claiming that the Soviet authorities began and influenced the existence of the Democratic Party [in Iran]. That is the basis of all your statements. The simplest way to discredit your absurd claim si to tell you about Iran, of which you are apparently ignorant. The people of Iran are oppressed, poverty-stricken, and miserable with hunger and disease. Their death rate is among the highest in the world, and their infant mortality rate threatens Iran with complete extinction. They are ruled without choice by feudalistic landowners, ruthless Khans, and venal industrialists. The peasants are slaves and the workers are paid a few pennies for a twelve hour day--not enough to keep their families in food. I can quote you all the figures you like to support these statements, quote them if necessary from British sources. I can also quote you the figures of wealth which is taken out of Iran yearly by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, of which the British Governemtn is the largest shareholder. 200 million pounds sterling have been taken out of Iran by your Oil company: a hundred times the total amount of Iran's national income and ten thousand times the total national income of the working people of Iran. By such natural resources as oil, Iran is by nature one of the wealthiest countries on earth. That wealth goes to Britain, while Iran remains poverty-ridden and without economic stability at all. It has no wage policies, no real trade unions, few hospitals, no sanitation and drainage, no irrigation, no proper housing, and no adequate road system. Its people have no rights before the law; their franchise in non-existent, and their parliamentary rights are destroyed by the corrupt method of election and political choice. The Iranian people suffer the terrors of a police regime, and they are prey to the manipulations of the grain speculators and the money operators. The racial minorities suffer discrimination and intolerance, and religious minorities are persecuted for political ends. Banditry threatens the mountain districts, and British arms have been used to support one tribe against another. I could go on indefinitely, painting you a picture of misery and starvation and imprisonment and subjection which must shame any human being capable of hearing it. Yet you say that the existence of a Democratic Party in Iran has been created by the Soviet authorities. You underestimate the Iranian people, Lord Essex! The Democratic Party has arisen out of all this misery and subjection as a force against corruption and oppression. Until now the Iranian people have been unable to create a political party because the police system prevented by terror and assassination. Any attempt to organize the workers and peasants was quickly halted by the execution of party leaders and the vast imprisonment of its followers. The Iranian people, however, have a long record of struggle and persistence, and they do not have to be told by the Soviet Union where their interests lie. They are not stupid and they are not utterly destroyed. They still posses the will to organize a democratic body and follow it into paths of Government. The Soviet Union has simply made sure that the police assassins did not interfere.... To talk of our part in 'creating' the democratic movement is an insult to the people and a sign of ignorance. We do not underestimate the Iranian people, and as far as we are concerned the Democratic Party...belongs to the people. It is their creation and their right, and it cannot be broken by wild charges which accuse the Soviet Union of its birth. We did not create it, and we have not interfered in the affairs of Iran. On the contrary, it is the British Government which has interfered continuously and viciously in Iran's affairs.