Quotes About Heritage

I go back to, like, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Elvis. I listen to everything.

I don't identify as white. I have a complex relationship with whiteness.

I think the most harmful belief passed on to me - not always directly - was the belief that whatever I did as a Negro, however much we Negroes achieved, despite the presence of some enlightened whites, white society as a whole enjoyed being racists in the secret core of their being and would never, ever give that up.

Friends and brothers, The Almighty created us Indians. We are as he made us. The Almighty has given to the whites a book to read, and they have plenty of things to work with. The Indian has no book. He cannot read.

One drop of black blood and you're black. That was the rule. That's what kept the wall between whites and blacks was this one drop rule. So I was raised with absolutely no ambiguity about that.

Archaeology holds all the keys to understanding who we are and where we come from.

I'm very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That's my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it's not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

For a while, I thought a lot about lineage. Where do I belong? Who am I standing next to?

I think you will find that a lot of young African-Americans are really searching for, 'Who am I?' and 'Where did I come from?' and 'What is my past?'

I always felt culturally adrift as a child because I'm mixed race. I've had to deal with that since I was little. Who am I? What makeup do I have? What are the black and the white?

Who cares about that stuff? This is America, not Jerusalem. I'm an American. Let Harry be a Jew.

When it comes to gang-based child exploitation, it is self-evident to anyone who cares to look that if you look at all the recent high-profile cases, there is a high proportion of men that are of Pakistani heritage.

Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.

You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution.

My grandmothers are Irish-American and German-American; my grandfather is from the Caribbean. My father is African-American. My family looked funny. I just started naturally imitating whoever I was talking to. I didn't want to be a phony, but I felt very authentic in the moment.

No matter what setting I play in, I will always be New Orleans. It's one of the only cities where you can hang out with the Marsalis family, the Neville brothers, whoever it might be, and we all play together.

You can't choose who your brother is. You're born, and whoever is in your family is your family. That's your blood. That's the way it is.

The Chinese culture belongs not only to the Chinese but also to the whole world.

The reason I made my stage name Kali Uchis is because it's still me in the sense that, my dad called me 'Kali Uchis' my whole life. It's still something I've been called since I was a baby. It's still me.

Enshrined in a language is the whole of a community's history and a large part of its cultural identity. The world is a mosaic of visions. To lose even one piece of this mosaic is a loss for all of us.

I am proud to be the granddaughter and daughter of immigrants who were brave enough to leave their homes and come to a whole new world with a different language and culture and immerse themselves fearlessly to start a better life for themselves and their families.

My parents were attached to Russian culture by a thousand ineradicable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they have. I assimilated wholeheartedly, found my parents in many ways embarrassing, and allowed my Russian to decline through neglect.

As for my brothers, of whom I had three, I know not how they were bred.