We should not be held back from pursuing our full talents, from contributing what we could contribute to the society, because we fit into a certain mould — because we belong to a group that historically has been the object of discrimination.

The world-wide discrimination against the autodidact has vitiated many people's confidence in determining their own goals and needs. But the same discrimination has also resulted in a multiplicity of growing minorities who are infuriated by this insidious dispossession.

Doors are opening now that were not open in the past, and the great challenge facing minority groups is to be ready to enter these doors as they open. No greater tragedy could befall us at this hour but that of allowing new opportunities to emerge with out the concomitant preparedness to meet them.

Ours is a golden age of minorities. At no time in the past have dissident minorities felt so much at home and had so much room to throw their weight around. They speak and act as if they were "the people," and what they abominate most is the dissent of the majority.

I've never really talked about this openly. I was too scared and too uncomfortable. Given what's happened recently with the death of George Floyd and the response to that, I've been asked about these issues more. The simple answer is that yes, in the military, I was discriminated against. It wasn't always open, so it was often subtle, but I felt it was there. Some people made assumptions about me just because of the color of my skin.

I have been discriminated against by white people for being black, by black people for being gay, by gay people for being too fem. Did I let them stop me from getting to this chair?

Statistically speaking, I am certain I have suffered from discrimination through my career. I’ve seen plenty of studies showing that men are awarded more research grants than women, that men are promoted more quickly than women and that men have higher salaries than women. I don’t think that I’m outside of the norm. And if we don’t believe that women are less capable, on average, than men, then by definition, I have been discriminated against.

My research marshaled concrete evidence to show that when historically marginalized communities gain a meaningful voice in the halls of power, it signals an open door where before many saw only barriers. And that, in turn, strengthens our democracy.

By virtue of their being regarded as something "exceptional," even by friends and well-wishers, Negroes of attainment and genius have been unfairly disassociated from the group and group credit lost accordingly.

The claims of the most backward sections like the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, who have suffered neglect and have hard to endure disabilities for many centuries. It would be my proud privilege to work for the establishment of a more just social order.

I knew that there were so many talented people out there who could do great things if only given a chance. However, due to extreme poverty, stigma, and marginalization,… many of them could not even get simple jobs. This was devastating for me, as I had grown up with them. They were my neighbours, my family members.

Most professional women can recount ‘horror stories’ about discrimination they have suffered during their careers. My stories include social trivia as well as grand trauma. But some less common forms of discrimination came my way when, in mid-career, I married a colleague and we joined our professional lives just as fame (though not fortune) hit him. I watched as he was manufactured into an architectural guru before my eyes and, to some extent, on the basis of our joint work and the work of our firm.

Was I ever discriminated against? There are two kinds of discrimination: explicit and implicit. For the most part, explicit discrimination did not affect me much. However, in retrospect, implicit discrimination—for example, the fact that I was so isolated as a postdoc because I could not share in college life—as well as my own internalized misogyny, did have a significant effect, though I hardly noticed this at the time. Another important factor, and one that I was aware of, was pervasive but not overt: it was very rare that women became professional scientists in Britain at the time, largely because science (and particularly “hard” as opposed to “life” science) was considered such a very unfeminine thing to do. ... These days, when most of the obvious barriers to women’s participation in mathematics have been removed, there still remain very strong and insidious internal barriers, shown in such phenomena as stereotype threat or imposter syndrome. The prejudices that lead to people accepting as completely normal that women should not get degrees at Cambridge (they first could get Cambridge degrees in 1948) are very strong and do not disappear immediately when the external barrier is removed. ...
In the 1960s there were, of course, very visible manifestations of the idea that academic life is not for women. At the time, most Ivy League universities in the States did not admit women, and in Britain almost all the colleges at the most prestigious universities (Oxford and Cambridge) were single sex.

many LGBTQ people did create art (writing, painting etc) that was recognized if their sexual identity was not well known. And sometimes even if they were more open, they were recognized because they were seen as exotic, or ‘different,’ or unusual (outside the norm) but not threatening. There are ways that some types of people can get around the strictures of the power structures. It is very easy to say that all minority groups are oppressed by the dominant power structure – but the reality is that groups are oppressed in different ways. Often one of the ways that they are oppressed is that the dominant culture lets one or two members of that group become noted: “She is a great woman artist” or “He is a very talented black actor.” And by singling out individuals, it makes them stand apart from their group and therefore retains the stigma for the entire group