Marginalized Quotes

“Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain and hears the screams healing can begin.”
― Danielle Bernock, Emerging With Wings: A True Story of Lies, Pain, And The LOVE that Heals

“It's not hard to marginalize people when they've already done it to themselves.”
― Seanan McGuire, Rosemary and Rue

“In a "man's world," women may feel unidentified as "default humans" but as a marginalized species, frequently misunderstood, often ignored. Instead of surviving in a man's world, they must reshape it, empower their individuality, claim and reframe their narrative, and engage in collective action. ("Terra Incognita - The lady is a tramp")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Jesus Christ, creator of the universe and all that is in it, cares about our smallest needs. He cares if we are wet and cold. He cares if we are hungry and discouraged. He cares if we are frightened or lonely. He cares if we are marginalized and excluded from Christian fellowship.”
― Suzanne DeWitt Hall, Where True Love Is: An Affirming Devotional for LGBTQI+ Individuals and Their Allies

“A society concerned with shalom will care for the most marginalized among them. God has a special concern for the poor and needy, because how we treat them reveals our hearts, regardless of the rhetoric we employ to make ourselves sound just.”
― Randy S. Woodley

“You will quite likely encounter the notion that we create our own reality. This can be an empowering idea and also true is so many ways. But it is also entitled and arrogant and can quickly move into a dangerous form of gaslighting. When this happens it is an act of shaming and a violence done. Because fucked up things happen. Fucked up and violent things. And to say that we create the entirely of our own realities is a way this world will have people- especially marginalized groups of people – hold responsibility for the circumstances in which they were without power. Guard yourself against perpetuating this, and hold yourself tenderly and solidly if it is ever pushed upon you.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“During COVID, we've all been kept out of things. Gorman's poem eloquently lists many of the things we've been kept out of. Then she wrote -

"Kept out of,
kept in,
kept from,
kept behind,
kept below,
kept down.
Kept without life.

Some were asked to walk a fraction of our exclusion for a year and it almost destroyed all they thought they were.

Yet here we are. Still Walking. Still kept.

To be kept to the edges of existence is the inheritance of the marginalized.”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry

“The Easiest Way to Fuck Everything Up Is to Ignore Black Women”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“When you're marginalized, there are no "them people," if we're all on the outskirts of the same margin.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn't get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“It makes you crazy, for something you know to be true, know from the very core or root of you, to remain unspeakable.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“Non-being, i.e., distance from society—social distance—is the very heritage of the oppressed. Which means to the oppressor, social distance is a humiliation. It is to be something less than free, or worse, someone less-than-white.

For what does the Karen carry but her dwindling power, dying & desperate? Dangerous & dangling like a gun hung from a tongue?”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry

“White American Christians can begin to look to and learn from the expressions of Christianity among the marginalized throughout history to find a new way forward, one that does not rely on violence in order to protect power over others and assuage the fear of losing what we consider ours.”
― Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church

“Denying the facts is what enables people to hate and to persecute marginalized and threatened minority groups. Labeling the advocacy, educational and informational initiatives of these persecuted minority groups dismissively as 'propaganda for the gay agenda' undermines, belittles and trivializes the cause of those whose right to exist is under threat.”
― Christina Engela

“I pledge allegiance to the disabled of the United States of America, and to free healthcare for which they need, one marginalized group under the government, unable to work, with freedom from poverty and social security payments for all.”
― Steven Magee

“Resources are limited in many schools--however, if we prioritize dismantling systemic oppression, if we prioritize the needs of our most marginalized students, we can find the time, support, money, and resources that we need.”
― Elena Aguilar, Coaching for Equity: Conversations That Change Practice

“The country will be created and run by thinkers and intelligents it can"t be run by a group of tribal and narrowed minds, when the thinker marginalized the nation will remain under the control of occupiers forever.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“Era por eso que, aunque Daisy se mofara de las historias de terror que contaban sobre norois, sabía que tenía que salir de casa. Allí, oculta entre lobos y fresnos, podía ser quien era sin miedo a ser demonizada por ello; un privilegio que solo unos pocos tenían. Y ella odiaba a los putos privilegiados.”
― Inés Platero Gracia, Noroi

“No world is civilized till no one is marginal.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat

“Black, white, brown or muslim,
or any qaum* of the human world,
no society is civilized society,
till no *community is marginal.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Little Planet on The Prairie: Dunya Benim, Sorumluluk Benim

“As a writer, a previously incarcerated person, and an activist, I acutely feel the weight of this carceral nation’s systems and structures on my own ability to feel and experience any degree of pleasure, especially when faced with the day-to-day dangers of being a person with marginalized identities. It is radical for me to care for myself as a whole and complex being in this country, which actively legislates against my right to do so.”
― Faylita Hicks

“If you must wave, wave the flag of those
who are stripped of their life and dignity.
Wave the rainbow, wave the watermelon -
lift up those thrown in manufactured obscurity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“It’s not a free country, it’s a free jungle, where predators roam free abusing the marginalized.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“I don't beg for equality, I establish equality.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“I never play the victim card, because to play the victim one would have to feel inferior somehow - which I don't - I am not inferior to anyone, quite the contrary, I am one of the most spectacular specimens of whole human that ever walked the earth - which is why, whenever I face derogatory remarks, my immediate response is not that of an offended minority, but that of a concerned parent disappointed at their child's misdemeanor.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“I don't plea, I execute (Sonnet 2212)

I never play the victim card,
because to play the victim one would
have to feel inferior somehow - which I don't -
I am not inferior to anyone, quite the contrary,

I am one of the most spectacular specimens
of whole human that ever walked the earth -
which is why, whenever I face derogatory remarks,
my immediate response is not that of an offended
minority, but that of a concerned parent
disappointed at their child's misdemeanor.

I don't beg for equality, I establish equality.
I don't plea for mercy, I execute justice.
Millennia yet for courts to catch up to my truth;
I don't outsource, I am the source of holiness.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“I don't plea, I execute.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Educating White People (Sonnet 2272)

The average colored person is ten times
smarter, wiser, braver, and stronger,
than most white people, not because
we are genetically superior,

but because, when an entire planet
is rigged in favor of white colonials
over the black, the brown, the latino,
arab, indian, chinese, turk, and what not,
we have to be exceptional to survive.

White people can be mediocre,
and still respected, glorified even,
but rest of us have to be Ramanujans,
Rumis, Naskars, just to be regarded as human.

Most of the world's geniuses are non-whites,
not because it's genetic, but because, like
white people inherit blonde hair and blue eyes,
or daddy's emeralds, we inherit generational
persecution, and any brain forced to endure
persecution as daily chore, becomes a powerhouse
of apparently supernatural mental faculties.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Most of the world's geniuses are non-whites, not because it's genetic, but because, like white people inherit blonde hair and blue eyes, or daddy's emeralds, we inherit generational persecution, and any brain forced to endure persecution as daily chore, becomes a powerhouse of apparently supernatural mental faculties.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“When Whiteness Collapses (Sonnet)

When the whites benefit from privilege,
it's part and parcel of colonial heritage,
but when a giant rises from the marginals,
it eclipses the shallow heights of whiteness.

I'm colored, I'm scientist,
I'm poet, I'm polyglot -
coming from zero money,
I won the world with words.

Try and get your puny white brains
around this existence enigma -
compile your white canons of a century,
and they turn bleak next to just one year
of multicultural, multidisciplinary Naskar.

I never grovelled to be included,
I let my vastness out,
and the world queues for my grace.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat