Minority Experience Quotes

I had to learn to navigate the political and religious currents in a state where Mormonism dominates despite not being Mormon.

One of the things I had to really wrap my head around is I have no control over what people call me: advocate, activist, gay, Filipino, undocumented person, gay person with an Asian face and Latino name.

I'm comfortable being old... being black... being Jewish.

Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

I'm Russian Jewish. And I had to grow up really quickly.

In fiction you're not often writing about the typical; you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour... another part comes from my personality: I'm an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody.

As somebody who happens to be gay, I particularly resent that minorities are being encouraged to be fragile and bitter.

People don't realize how black people, minorities, women as well, all their lives, they have had to make the effort to understand everybody else. All my life, I've known American culture very well. I probably know American literature more than the average American.

I read this book when I was young. It's about a black girl growing up in Heaven, Ohio. The cover has a black girl with clouds behind her. It was the first book cover I ever saw with a girl that looked like me.

Not only was I not white, to many people I wasn’t Asian either

I was black growing up in an all-white neighborhood, so I felt like I just didn't fit in. Like I wasn't as good as everybody else, or as smart, or whatever.

I've been there; I've been in the minority before. It humbles the exalted. But that's all right.

I was the only black girl at my junior high school. I had an afro, a Jamaican accent, I looked really old.

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.

Race doesn't mean what it used to in America anymore. It just doesn't. Obama's black, but he's not black the way people used to define that. Is black your experience or the color of your skin? My experience is as a Mexican immigrant, more so than someone like George Lopez. He's from California. But he'll be treated as an immigrant. I am an outsider. My abuelita, my grandmother, didn't speak English. My whole family on my dad's side is in Mexico. I won't ever be called that or treated that way, but it was my experience.

The great thing about being a standard-issue, straight white person is you have so much time. Gay people, people of color, we have less time! We have to be a living Learning Annex to everybody. We don't have time to master hobbies like skipping rocks along lakes.

I was Catholic. You talk about a minority within a minority within a minority: a black Catholic in Savannah, GA.

It doesn't bother me a bit when people say, 'Merry Christmas' to me. I don't think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it.

Basically, the system works to my disadvantage for no other reason than that I am a person of color, and I am telling stories about people of color.

When someone lives as a minority, they experience the world differently than those of us who live in the majority. We may occupy the same physical space, but we don't occupy the same psychic space.

I think being collaborative is definitely more natural for people who are minorities in any sense - so people who aren't, like, white male artists - because we don't have the privilege to create art and work alone, usually.

For American philo-Semites, the Jewish experience wasn't just one minority experience among many, but a signal and elevated case.

Growing up as Chinese-American, as someone who experienced racism, questions of 'otherness' are always at the forefront of my mind.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.

As black folks we're always sensitive. As a black person it's always racial.