A Quote by Munira Mirza

Paradoxically, just at the point when racist attitudes were declining in society and many ethnic groups were integrating successfully, our political leaders became obsessed with racism.
Many of them who belong to these countries that were former colonial powers have racist attitudes, but their racist attitude is never displayed to the degree that the America's attitude of racism is displayed. Never.
I honestly thought that since I didn't associate myself with any people or groups who were outwardly racist, and I didn't act in a way that struck me as racist, that this meant that I myself was not a racist, and that racism wasn't a huge issue.
The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.
We have been making constant efforts, all the time, to start dialogue with the SLORC, but you know it takes two. We don't want a monologue. We would like a substantive political dialogue among the SLORC, political leaders including myself, and leaders of ethnic groups-exactly as stipulated in the U.N. General Assembly resolution on Burma.
Many of us actively working to interrupt racism continually hear complaints about the 'gotcha' culture of white anti-racism. There is a stereotype that we are looking for every incident we can find so we can spring out, point our fingers, and shout, 'You're a racist!'
The attitudes of many police organizations were extremely negative to the prospect of Rap, and many officials weren't afraid to say that they were against it. To them, Rappers were just criminals waiting to get caught.
I was influenced by the political environment of our country that has just gained freedom from British colonialism. And the seminal figures in that environment were Mahatma Gandhi, who had been assassinated shortly after I was born, but nevertheless dominated the collective psyche of the country. And of course there were other statesmen who were very much part of the culture we knew as well as looked upon by society as leaders, and mentors, and people that inspires us to have a vision for idealism.
Finally Irish were accepted into society and became part of the political system, and there were Kennedys, and so on. But the same is true about other waves of immigrants, like the Jews in the 1950s.
The first comedians I became fascinated with were the Marx brothers. I couldn't get enough of them. Later in life, I thought, "Well, maybe it's because they were so rebellious and they were just flipping the bird to society and all the rules we're supposed to follow." They were saying that none of it is fair.
And what is the Republican solution to these outrageous [racial] inequalities? There isn't one. And that's the point. Denying racism is the new racism. To not acknowledge those statistics, to think of that as a 'black problem' and not an American problem. To believe, as a majority of FOX viewers do, that reverse-racism is a bigger problem than racism, that's racist.
Our country today is at a cross-point of several crises that were triggered by three groups of causes: the effects of the 2008 world crisis, the external political and economic pressure, and the internal problems and constraints that have built up in our economy
The pictures that were coming from Vietnam were showing us what was really happening on the ground level. It was in contradiction to what our political and military leaders were telling us. They were straight forward documentary images. A powerful indictment of the war, of how cruel and unjust it was. When I finally decided what to do with my life, it was to follow in that tradition.
In America, communities existed before governments. There were many groups of people with a common sense of purpose and a feeling of duty to one another before there were political institutions.
I came from a war-torn country and I was a victim of that racism because within tribes, within political lines, people were fighting. The first thing that I like to fight is racism because I know what it means, how it destroys the fabric of my society, of my wellbeing.
If we could reach the point where many of our nation's future leaders know what teachers know after teaching successfully in our highest-need schools, we would have a very different situation.
Me and my sisters were taught that if our eyes worked and our legs worked, we were beautiful. We had so many kids in our family that if we all got in front of the mirror and were ashamed of browns and golds and yellows and whites, and we believed what society told us - that the darker people were less attractive and the lighter ones were prettier - we would have had sibling murders. My family, being half-rural and half-military, just came from a different place.
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