On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in forgoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family.
Eleanor Holmes NortonRead
Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination... Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the black middle class.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Affirmative action is a crucial method for combating discrimination and has significantly contributed to the economic advancement of marginalized communities.
Eleanor Holmes Norton highlights the importance of affirmative action as a vital strategy for reducing discrimination, particularly in the context of the United States. By asserting that it is the most effective tool in promoting equality, she emphasizes its role in establishing the black middle class through measurable statistical evidence. This quote underlines the necessity of such policies to create significant socio-economic change and to address historical injustices faced by marginalized groups.
Themes
Affirmative ActionDiscriminationEqualitySocial JusticeBlack Middle Class
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech addressing the importance of social justice policies.
More from Eleanor Holmes Norton
All quotes →Affirmative action is the most important modern anti-discrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination. No one who knows anything about the subject would say it hasn't worked. It has certainly done something, or else it wouldn't have provoked so much opposition.
Eleanor Holmes NortonRead
I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The '99 percent' is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.
Eleanor Holmes NortonRead
Similar quotes
The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made.
F. Sionil JosRead
When you ask people to name victims of police brutality, for the most part, nobody will give you a woman's name.
Kimberle Williams CrenshawRead
The appalling racial injustice inherent in the Trayvon Martin tragedy reminds us that there is still much to do.
Martin Luther King IiiRead
Drugs is a government game, Bilal. A way to rob us of our best black men, our army. Everyone who plays the game loses. Then they get you right back where we started, in slavery! Then they get to say "This time you did it to yourself." I won't play that game.
Sister SouljahRead
The success of the few does not excuse the caste-like system that exists for many. In fact, black exceptionalism - the high-profile, highly visible examples of the black success - actually serves to justify and rationalize mass incarceration.
Michelle AlexanderRead
There are people getting screwed in our country every single second, minute, hour of the day. And if by our work, we can decrease that number, we'll make a difference; we'll be doing our jobs.
Mazie HironoRead