“Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.”
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About this quote
This line comes from Gandhi's early years in South Africa and reflects the racial prejudice of that period — contempt he is rightly criticized for and later moved beyond. Read plainly, it shows how dehumanizing language works: reducing a whole people to a crude stereotype to rank one group above another.
When to use it
- A political speech paints migrants as lazy freeloaders to rally a crowd against them.
- A community pushes back when a newspaper caricatures its people as a single ugly stereotype.
- Coworkers challenge a joke that reduces an entire nationality to one demeaning trait.