Daily Inspiration Quote by Lena Horne

A slap of clarity disguised as a simple sentence, Lena Horne’s line doesn’t just condemn racism and sexism; it indicts the machinery that manufactures them. “You have to be taught” shifts blame away from some imagined natural order and onto institutions: families, schools, studios, unions, casting offices, the press. Second-class status isn’t a personal failing or a biological destiny, it’s a curriculum, delivered through rules and rituals until it feels like common sense.

Horne’s phrasing is doing strategic work. The passive structure implies an instructor without naming one, because in her world the teacher was everywhere: Jim Crow law, segregated venues, “colored” entrances, contracts that limited roles to ornament and caricature. She was a glamorous star in an industry that loved Black performance but feared Black equality; the lesson wasn’t only taught to the oppressed, it was drilled into the audience, too, so the hierarchy could be consumed as entertainment.

The subtext is anger with discipline. “Taught” suggests repetition, correction, punishment: the small humiliations that train someone to lower their gaze, soften their ambition, accept less pay, smaller rooms, fewer protections. It’s also a rebuttal to the oldest excuse in the book: that inequality is merely “how things are.” Horne refuses the alibi of nature and replaces it with a human choice. If second-class citizenship is learned, it can be unlearned, and the people doing the teaching can be confronted, named, and outvoted.