Quotes About Belonging

When I was young, I had this feeling that there was this handbook that I had never gotten that explained how to be, how to laugh, what to wear, how to stand by yourself in the hallway. Everyone looked so natural - like they all practiced and knew exactly what to do - even the way they pushed their hair out of their face.

If you close your eyes and think about where you feel the most safe, you're probably not going to tell me it's in a room full of police. You feel safe where you're around people that love you, when you have food and shelter, when you're being pushed to be your best self and learn.

Keep pushing people into their racial affinity groups, keep telling us to identify with our race and you know what will happen? Some White people will actually take you up on that and guess what? You'll have more real, actual racists.

Millions of us, myself included, go back generations in this country, with ancestors who put in the painstaking work to become citizens. So we don't like the notion that anyone might get a free pass to American citizenship.

Part-black generally means all-black in Americans' minds. Just as part-Asian or part-Hispanic or part-anything-else usually puts individuals in those minority-groups' camps.

I'm not foreign enough to play foreigners... I have sort of a mid-Atlantic British accent that puts me in the middle of everything, so they don't know quite where to put me.

Sometimes America is so great because it brings all of us together, but sometimes it can be so limiting because it puts labels on things.

The Royal family to me are not England, and they are not the flag.

Our politics is about people not flags.

I will never be done with South Florida.

I was in Colorado for about 15 years but my family is all from Florida.

We need a place in which we may flourish and be ourselves.

I'm so Filipino. I'm fluent in Filipino.

'The Red Era' is for everybody. Every gay, every fluid, every black, every white.

When it comes to fitting in, I think I'm really fly. It's not really hard; I'm just being myself.

Black folk have been 'the other' in shows and movies and in life for quite a long time. Not from our perspective, we're not 'the other,' but from other people's perspective we have been 'the other.'

I've had a lot of folks tell me that my songs weren't quite country because they didn't really sound like anybody that had come along and done it before me. I felt a little out of place for a while.

Church gives people a sense of community, a sense of how to behave... social support when times get tough. In a world where white working class folks are going to church less and less, they're losing that when they might really need it.

The only black folks in town when I was growing up were me and my cousins and one other family.

Being born into a Malayali family that followed a matriarchal system, I always felt loved and had a high sense of self-worth.

Once a story is set to a particular city, language and culture, the rest just follows.

I'm a third-generation Miamian. I'm fond of it. I'm an expatriate, so it's the only American city I can still legitimately claim.

I think if you run away from who you are, that you're a Democrat and you're proud to be a Democrat, it's foolish. And the reason it's foolish is you've got a lot to be proud of.

In high school I was the manager of the football team, so being around boys is natural to me!