Barack Obama Quotes About Discrimination
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I actually believe that some residue of discrimination would lessen, because it's my view that there is a certain percentage of the white population that stereotypes and makes assumptions about African Americans because they don't inject the history of slavery and Jim Crow into current incarceration rates, or crime rates, or poverty rates, or what have you.
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My view is that discrimination against anyone at the ballot box is wrong and should have the full enforcement of the federal government.
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The Supreme Court had the choice not only which way to rule, pro- or anti-gay marriage rights, but also how they were going to rule. They could have ruled just federalism, saying, "This isn't a matter for federal; this isn't a federal issue at all. States should decide it." Or they could decide it on equal protection grounds and say that, "Gay discrimination is wrong."
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This is why the anti-discrimination principle being enforced is important. Because it won't stop if some of the underlying biases aren't challenged and surfaced. And that in and of itself creates backlash and denial. This is what I mean when I say better is hard.
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We must build a world free of unnecessary barriers, stereotypes, and discrimination. ... policies must be developed, attitudes must be shaped, and buildings and organizations must be designed to ensure that everyone has a chance to get the education they need and live independently as full citizens in their communities.
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One of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way we've internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little from the world and from themselves.
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No discrimination, that's what we're about as a country.
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I reject discrimination against Muslim Americans - who are just as patriotic as we are.
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We don't make determinations about who we love. And that's why I think that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is wrong.
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We're still fighting to make sure that basic anti-discrimination laws are enforced, not just at the federal level, by the way, but throughout government and throughout the private sector? And those are fights that we can win because - and this is where I do believe America has changed - the majority, not by any means 100 percent, but the majority of Americans believe in the idea of nondiscrimination.
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I applaud the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act. This was discrimination enshrined in law. It treated loving, committed gay and lesbian couples as a separate and lesser class of people. The Supreme Court has righted that wrong, and our country is better off for it. We are a people who declared that we are all created equal - and the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.
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Does that mean that all vestiges of past discrimination would be eliminated, that the income gap or the wealth gap or the education gap [between Afro-Americans and white] would be erased in five years or 10 years? Probably not, and so this is obviously a discussion we've had before when you talk about something like reparations.
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It is my view that if society was doing the right thing with respect to you, [and there were] programs targeted at helping people rise into the middle class and have a good income and be able to save and send their kids to school, and you've got a vigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, then I have confidence in the black community's capabilities to then move forward.
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I think that people are concerned about the breakdown of the family but they also don't want to see discrimination against gays and lesbians who they work with and they want to be able to make sure that gays can visit each other in hospitals and be able to inherit property.
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In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.
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I've called on Congress to repeal the so-called Defense of Marriage Act to help end discrimination to help end discrimination against same-sex couples in this country. Now, I want to add we have a duty to uphold existing law, but I believe we must do so in a way that does not exacerbate old divides. And fulfilling this duty in upholding the law in no way lessens my commitment to reversing this law. I've made that clear.
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Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it's not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument.
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Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.
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Everybody deserves fair treatment, equal treatment in the eyes of the law and the state. And that includes gays, lesbians, transgender persons. I am not a fan of discrimination and bullying of anybody on the basis of race, on the basis of religion, on the basis of sexual orientation or gender. This is actually part and parcel of the agenda that's also going to be front and centre, and that is how are we treating women and girls.
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