Daily Inspiration Quote by Alexis Herman

Education, in Alexis Herman's framing, isn't a ladder so much as a light switch. She treats knowledge less as self-improvement and more as situational awareness: if you can't name discrimination, you're easier to manage, easier to placate, easier to convince that inequity is either over or purely personal. The opening move, "first of all", signals a corrective. She's not celebrating education's abstract virtues; she's insisting on its first job being recognition - a refusal of amnesia.

The blunt repetition in "still exists. It is still real" does political work. It anticipates the familiar backlash that discrimination is a relic, an overplayed accusation, a problem solved by law or etiquette. Herman, a public servant shaped by the late 20th century's uneasy afterlife of civil rights victories, is pushing against the complacency that follows incremental progress: the idea that because certain doors opened, the building is now fair. "We should not take that for granted" reads like a warning about institutional drift. Rights can be diluted by policy tweaks, by hiring "culture fit", by quiet retaliation - mechanisms that rarely announce themselves as discrimination but function as it.

Her workplace emphasis matters. This isn't only a moral argument; it's an economic one. Work is where dignity gets quantified, where bias becomes wage gaps, stalled careers, and who gets believed in meetings. Herman's intent is pragmatic: education as a tool for seeing patterns, documenting them, and sustaining the will to challenge them even when the culture would prefer closure.