Ethnicity Quotes

“Tofu tacos are not Mexican. I think putting tofu on anything and calling it Mexican is an insult to my people.”
― Simone Elkeles, Rules of Attraction

“Choose your friends and mates, not by the money in their bank account, creed, ethnicity, or color; instead, choose character, actions, heart, and soul. When we bleed, we bleed the same color.”
― Ana Monnar

“I have always been taught to be proud of being Latina, proud of being Mexican, and I was. I was probably more proud of being a "label" than of being a human being, that's the way most of us were taught.”
― Erin Gruwell, The Freedom Writers Diary

“NATIONALISM is another form of EXTREMISM”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“We need to eliminate the concept of division by class, skills, race, income, religion, and nationality. Every human requires food and water to survive and every human has a heart that bleeds, loves, and grieves.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“[Kurt Cobain] had a lot of German in him. Some Irish. But no Jew. I think that if he had had a little Jew he would have [expletive] stuck it out.”
― Courtney Love

“This is God's universe and he is the master gardener of all. If we were to eliminate all colors in his garden,then what would be a rainbow with only one color? Or a garden with only one kind of flower? Why would the Creator create a vast assortment of plants, ethnicities, and animals, if only one beast or seed is to dominate all of existence?”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“My mom and dad refused to believe that people who had grown up together in peace and friendship, had gone to the same schools, spoken the same language, and listened to the same music, could overnight be blinded by ethnic hatred and start to brutally kill one another. They simply didn't accept as true that less than two years of a multiparty system and competition for power could poison people's brains so much.”
― Savo Heleta, Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia

“The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and ethnic dictatorship in the Balkans took precedence. This, by the way, was partly a battle to save Muslims from Catholic and Christian Orthodox killers. That impressed me. The neo-cons also took the view, quite early on, that coexistence with Saddam Hussein was impossible as well as undesirable. They were dead right about that. They had furthermore been thinking about the menace of jihadism when most people were half-asleep.

And then I have to say that I was rather struck by the way that the Weekly Standard and its associated voices took the decision to get rid of Trent Lott earlier this year, thus removing an embarrassment as well as a disgrace from the political scene. And their arguments were on points of principle, not 'perception.' I liked their ruthlessness here, and their seriousness, at a time when much of the liberal Left is not even seriously wrong, but frivolously wrong, and babbles without any sense of responsibility. (I mean, have you read their sub-Brechtian stuff on Halliburton....?) And revolution from above, in some states and cases, is—as I wrote in my book A Long Short War—often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“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.”
― Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights

“The story Grandpa told us helped me realize that people cannot be divided into groups by ethnicity, religion, or any other feature, only into groups of good, bad, and indifferent people.”
― Savo Heleta, Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia

“The world citizen is a small leaf on the giant tree of life. They do not see a difference between the branch they were born on and the remaining branches on the tree, because they understand well that we are are all connected to the same roots. The world citizen sees each section of the world as part of their arm, leg, eyes, and heart. They do not class, contain or separate themselves or their identity by ethnicity or religion -- because they see their existence as a small part of a greater whole. When asked about their religion, the world citizen simply replies: 'My heart.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States. Europeans, Russians, and Americans rarely considered that everyday bilingualism might bespeak political maturity, and imagined instead that a Ukraine that spoke two languages must be divided into two groups and two halves. "Ethnic Ukrainians" must be a group that acts in one way, and "ethnic Russians" in another. This is about as true as to say that "ethnic Americans" vote Republican. It is more a summary of a politics that defines people by ethnicity, proposing to them an eternity of grievance rather than a politics of the future.”
― Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

“Those without heritage, history, and place are subject to exploitation, manipulation, and deception.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Actual class struggles apart, one of the aesthetic ways you could prove that there was a class system in America was by cogitating on the word, or acronym, 'WASP.' First minted by E. Digby Baltzell in his book The Protestant Establishment , the term stood for 'White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.' Except that, as I never grew tired of pointing out, the 'W' was something of a redundancy (there being by definition no BASPs or JASPs for anyone to be confused with, or confused about). 'ASP,' on the other hand, lacked some of the all-important tone. There being so relatively few Anglo-Saxon Catholics in the United States, the 'S' [sic] was arguably surplus to requirements as well. But then the acronym AS would scarcely do, either. And it would raise an additional difficulty. If 'Anglo-Saxon' descent was the qualifying thing, which surely it was, then why were George Wallace and Jerry Falwell not WASPs? After all, they were not merely white and Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, but very emphatic about all three things. Whereas a man like William F. Buckley, say, despite being a white Irish Catholic, radiated the very sort of demeanor for which the word WASP had been coined to begin with. So, for the matter of that, did the dapper gentleman from Richmond, Virginia, Tom Wolfe. Could it be, then, that WASP was really a term of class rather than ethnicity? Q.E.D.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“To be white in the Caribbean is to have money, power, and the freedom to do anything or nothing - it is, in many cases, to occupy the top rung of society.”
― Sharon Hurley Hall, Exploring Shadeism

“The experience of slavery is the bedrock on which Caribbean society has been founded.”
― Sharon Hurley Hall, Exploring Shadeism

“All roots lead to Africa.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“There is no genetic test for ethnicity - science declares sanctions on racism, not validation.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“Beyond markers of immediate biological family, DNA ancestry tests are practically meaningless.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“There is no genetic test for ethnicity - science declares sanctions on racism, not validation. If you are seeking validation for your bigotry and prejudice, all we scientists can offer you are directions to the nearest psychiatrist.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“There is no White DNA, Black DNA - no Muslim DNA, Jewish DNA - no Aryan DNA, Dravidian DNA. We're made of stuff of the stars, why do you still rot in the jungle gutter!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“He [Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 1795], coined the term Caucasian on the basis of a favorite skull of his that had come into his possession from the Caucasus Mountains of Russia. To him, the skull was the most beautiful of all that he owned. So he gave the group to which he belonged, the Europeans, the same name as the region that had produced it. That is how people now identified as white got the scientific-sounding yet random name Caucasian.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Black Eve, Mother of The Human Race (Sonnet)

If anthropology is anything to go by,
and if there is a God, then it'd be a black woman,
not a white, bearded, patronizing, male git -
because the only entity who could be considered
the origin of the human race, is a black woman -
not Adam, but Eve - a black Eve.

But then again, considering all the massacres,
genocide, persecution, and downright mindlessness,
perhaps God is indeed a white guy, because nobody
could've screwed up so neatly except a white colonialist.

But sarcasm aside, let's talk some facts of biology -
no ethnicity has exclusive predisposition for atrocity,
just like no ethnicity has a franchise over greatness -
morons come in all shapes, sizes, genders and colors.

In nature there is no ethnicity,
there is only ecosystem of synergy.
Ethnicity is a product of dogma,
not a marker of human capacity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology

“Ethnicity is a product of dogma, not a marker of human capacity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology

“Anyone who is waiting for a critical mass of people of color to transform a white space will wait until Judgment Day. . . . Identity is not a question of numbers. It’s a question of storytelling.”
― Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque

“They share your passion for the poignant gleam of the unforeseen, the way a new experience can shake the heart. But they don’t, they can’t share your hope that the men of color will never change, that the women of color will go on picking cotton in the valley between Samarkand and Bukhara, laughing as you photograph them, their faded gowns held above the knees, full to bursting with great balls of snow. My father and uncle don’t share your wish that the people of color maintain, for the benefit of the white moderns, a reservoir of timeless, elemental life. How could they?”
― Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque

“Dogma of ethnicity is the ruin of civilization.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“There is no White DNA, Black DNA.
There is no Muslim DNA, Jewish DNA.
We're made of stuff of the stars,
why do you still rot in the jungle gutter!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience