Creativity Quote by Marian Anderson

Prejudice, Marian Anderson suggests, is less a monster you can point to than a constant, maddening sensation you can never quite locate. The hair-on-the-cheek image is brilliant because it’s domestic and bodily: not an abstract moral lecture, but an itch. You don’t need a manifesto to understand it. You’ve lived it.

The metaphor also flips the usual framing. Prejudice isn’t just the harm done to the target; it’s the psychic static it creates in everyone forced to move through it. “You can’t see it” captures how bias hides behind manners, policies, and “that’s just how things are.” “You can’t find it with your fingers” hints at how clumsy our usual tools are - denial, politeness, even good intentions - when we try to grasp what’s wrong. Yet you keep brushing anyway, repeatedly, publicly, sometimes to the annoyance of others. That’s activism in miniature: not a single heroic act, but the exhausting repetition of insisting something is there when the room pretends it isn’t.

Anderson’s context sharpens the edge. A world-class contralto barred from major venues because she was Black, she understood how discrimination could be both blatant and strangely evasive - people refusing you while insisting they’re being reasonable. The quote carries the fatigue of that contradiction. Prejudice irritates because it won’t resolve; it keeps returning, demanding attention, disrupting your composure. The subtext is a warning and a permission slip: if you feel compelled to “brush at it,” you’re not being overly sensitive. You’re responding normally to an abnormal condition.