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Yoko Ono: Old prejudices will not survive

CBS News asked noted figures in the arts, business and politics about their experience in today's civil rights movement, or about figures who inspired them in their activism.

Yoko Ono, singer-songwriter, artist

Can America achieve a "post-racial" society? How?

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Courtesy of Yoko Ono

One thing that is helping is there are so many of us going through mixed marriage. Our kids are double, triple or quadruple races of opposite sex [or] same-sex marriages. There's no way we could keep up the old prejudices.

Is there something that you'd like to share about your personal connection to civil rights issues?

All my life, I have been exposed to racism and sexism. They kept following me around. However, I never thought I would be affected by ageism.

In my experience, physical age is never related to spiritual age. Somebody can be very young when they are 90 and very old when they are 30. Ageism is a discriminatory presumption, which ignores those factors.

So just like racism and sexism, by ageism, you may not be giving a warm and lovely hug to a new friend, who was a great friend all your life but just changed the looks a little.


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