"There are still traces of discrimination against race and gender, but it's a lot different than when I started out. It just comes quietly, slowly, sometimes so quietly that you don't realize it until you start looking back"
About this Quote
Discrimination, Eddie Bernice Johnson suggests, didn’t so much disappear as learn to whisper. The line lands because it refuses the comfort of a clean moral arc. Yes, she grants progress, but she immediately undercuts any triumphalism with a politician’s seasoned realism: power rarely relinquishes itself outright; it adjusts its tactics.
Her phrasing maps a shift from overt exclusion to the slow bureaucracy of bias. “Traces” is doing quiet work here: it acknowledges measurable change without letting anyone pretend the residue is harmless. The repetition of “quietly, slowly” reads like an indictment of systems that can plausibly deny their own intent. When discrimination is loud, it’s easy to name and fight. When it’s ambient, it becomes an atmosphere people learn to breathe, rationalize, even mistake for normal friction.
The most cutting insight is temporal. “You don’t realize it until you start looking back” captures how incremental injustice evades the senses in real time. It’s not just a personal reflection; it’s a warning about how institutions produce unequal outcomes through accumulated “small” decisions: who gets heard in a meeting, who is deemed “electable,” who gets resources, who is labeled “difficult,” who is praised as “pragmatic.” Johnson’s career, spanning civil rights-era politics into the age of diversity statements and coded language, gives the observation its authority. She’s not describing a villain; she’s describing a method.
Her phrasing maps a shift from overt exclusion to the slow bureaucracy of bias. “Traces” is doing quiet work here: it acknowledges measurable change without letting anyone pretend the residue is harmless. The repetition of “quietly, slowly” reads like an indictment of systems that can plausibly deny their own intent. When discrimination is loud, it’s easy to name and fight. When it’s ambient, it becomes an atmosphere people learn to breathe, rationalize, even mistake for normal friction.
The most cutting insight is temporal. “You don’t realize it until you start looking back” captures how incremental injustice evades the senses in real time. It’s not just a personal reflection; it’s a warning about how institutions produce unequal outcomes through accumulated “small” decisions: who gets heard in a meeting, who is deemed “electable,” who gets resources, who is labeled “difficult,” who is praised as “pragmatic.” Johnson’s career, spanning civil rights-era politics into the age of diversity statements and coded language, gives the observation its authority. She’s not describing a villain; she’s describing a method.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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