Politics & Power Quote by Donna Shalala

Shalala’s sentence does what seasoned public servants often do: it praises change while warning against complacency, all without sounding like a scold. The first move is strategic flattery. By framing young people, “particularly minorities,” as “no longer putting up” with inherited indignities, she shifts the center of gravity away from institutions and toward agency. It’s a political compliment that doubles as a diagnosis: the old system didn’t just oppress; it trained people to endure.

The subtext is generational and moral, but also bureaucratic. “Self-confident” reads like a character trait, yet it’s really a proxy for structural shifts: civil rights gains, demographic power, social media amplification, and the mainstreaming of workplace and campus norms around harassment and bias. She’s describing a new enforcement mechanism - not law first, but stigma first. “It’s no longer acceptable” is the key phrase: the battlefield is cultural permission.

Then comes the pivot that keeps the quote from becoming a triumphal story. “But it has always been present in American society” insists on continuity. Shalala is refusing the comforting narrative that racism and sexism are aberrations that can be solved by better manners. The line quietly rebukes nostalgia and the “we’re past that” rhetoric that often follows incremental progress.

Context matters: as a public servant associated with health, education, and governance, she’s speaking from inside institutions that routinely lag behind the moral urgency of the people they serve. The intent isn’t only to applaud youth; it’s to justify why systems must change now, because the public’s tolerance for the old baseline has collapsed.