Category: diversity
Quotes of Category: diversity
After Lincoln became president he campaigned for colonization, and even in the midst of war with the Confederacy found time to work on the project, appointing Rev. James Mitchell as Commissioner of Emigration, in charge of finding a place to which blacks could be sent.On August 14th, 1862, he invited a group of black leaders to the White House to try to persuade them to leave the country, telling them that "there is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us." He urged them to lead their people to a colonization site in Central America. Lincoln was therefore the first president to invite a delegation of blacks to the White House-and did so to ask them to leave the country. Later that year, in a message to Congress, he argued not just for voluntary colonization but for the forcible removal of free blacks.Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, shared these anti-black sentiments: "This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men." Like Jefferson, he thought whites had a clear destiny: "This whole vast continent is destined to fall under the control of the Anglo-Saxon race-the governing and self-governing race."Before he became president, James Garfield wrote, "{I have} a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way . . . ."Theodore Roosevelt blamed Southerners for bringing blacks to America. In 1901 he wrote: "I have not been able to think out any solution to the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent . . . ." As for Indians, he once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't inquire too closely into the health of the tenth."William Howard Taft once told a group of black college students, "Your race is adapted to be a race of farmers, first, last, and for all times."Woodrow Wilson was a confirmed segregationist, and as president of Princeton he refused to admit blacks. He enforced segregation in government offices and was supported in this by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, who argued that "civilized white men" could not be expected to work with "barbarous black men."During the presidential campaign of 1912, Wilson took a strong position in favor of excluding Asians: "I stand for the national policy of exclusion. . . . We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. . . . Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson."Warren Harding also wanted the races kept separate: "Men of both races {black and white} may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. This is not a question of social equality, but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference. Racial amalgamation there cannot be. book-quotelearningracediversityThe immigration laws that were in force until 1965 were a continuation of earlier laws written to maintain a white majority. However, after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and accommodation, a racially restrictive immigration policy was an embarrassment. The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965-also known as the Hart-Celler Act-abolished national origins quotas and opened immigration to all parts of the world.Its backers, however, emphasized that they did not expect it to have much impact. "Under the proposed bill," explained Senator Edward Kennedy, "the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. Secondly, the ethnic mix will not be upset. Contrary to charges in some quarters, it will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area." The senator suggested that at most 62,000 people a year might immigrate. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law, he also downplayed its impact: "This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives . . . ."The backers were wrong. In 1996, for example, there were a record 1,300,000 naturalizations 70 and perhaps 90 percent of the new citizens were non-white. Large parts of the country are being transformed by immigration. But the larger point is that "diversity" of the kind that immigration is now said to provide was never proposed as one of the law's benefits. No one dreamed that in just 20 years ten percent of the entire population of El Salvador would have moved to the United States or that millions of mostly Hispanic and Asian immigrants would reduce whites to a racial minority in California in little more than 20 years.In 1965-before diversity had been decreed a strength-Americans would have been shocked by the prospect of demographic shifts of this kind. Whites were close to 90 percent of the American population, and immigration reform would have failed if its backers had accurately predicted its demographic consequences. book-quoteimmigrationracediversityWe are among the first peoples in human history who do not broadly inherit religious identity as a given, a matter of kin and tribe, like hair color and hometown. But the very fluidity of this-the possibility of choice that arises, the ability to craft and discern one's own spiritual bearings-is not leading to the decline of spiritual life but its revival. It is changing us, collectively. It is even renewing religion, and our cultural encounter with religion, in counterintuitive ways. I meet scientists who speak of a religiosity without spirituality-a reverence for the place of ritual in human life, and the value of human community, without a need for something supernaturally transcendent. There is something called the New Humanism, which is in dialogue about moral imagination and ethical passions across boundaries of belief and nonbelief. But I apprehend- with a knowledge that is as much visceral as cognitive- that God is love. That somehow the possibility of care that can transform us- love muscular and resilient- is an echo of a reality behind reality, embedded in the creative force that gives us life. book-quotelovelifehuman
