Quotes About Culture

When elected officials and others contribute to a climate and culture that fosters hyper-partisanship, we've got to blow the whistle.

In Ethiopia... you might find a seven-year-old expected to take 15 goats out into the fields for the whole day with only a chapati to eat and his whistle. Why are we so afraid to give our children responsibilities like this?

People want to call me racist for doing the Bon Qui Qui character, and I'm like, 'Look, Bon Qui Qui is a representation of a hood chick. That's it.' There are lots of hood chicks out there: some are black, some are Mexican, some are Salvadorian, and some are white.

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

I'm light-skinned. I'm mixed with black and white.

If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they're not happy.

Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The white man's God cannot love our people, or He would protect them.

That show, 'The Amazing Race' - is that about white people?

You always want what you can't have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born, I could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained.

Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.

White people couldn't do black music back in the day because they weren't funky or bad enough. They weren't from the ghettoes, but hip-hop and R&B changed all of that because white kids want to be down with it. They wanted to learn it so they studied the culture. It's kind of a cool thing because we shouldn't be so separate.

I like boring black and white films with subtitles. I'm basically a drip.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That's not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that's what life needs to be - and that if it's not that, it's all screwed up. It's not.

I was taught that Jesus the Son of God was a white man, and hearing black people singing, 'Lord, wash me, and I will be whiter than snow,' made me sick.

There's a misconception that I can't relate to the quote-unquote 'Asian-American experience' because I didn't grow up with an Asian mom and dad. And that's just not true. I am Asian American, and so playing a girl who is half Korean, half white, but her white dad tried really hard to connect with her mom's heritage - that's very familiar to me.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I remember watching 'Boyz n the Hood,' and there is a scene where Cuba Gooding, Jr. gets pressed against a car by a police officer, and he starts crying because it's so humiliating. I remember thinking in that moment that I could totally identify with him, and I'm a little white kid from Canada.

I know Spanish pretty well. I'm half-Puerto Rican - my mom is from Puerto Rico - so I have a lot of family there, and my mom's first language is Spanish. But growing up in the States, and with my dad being from the States, I'm kind of just like this white kid.

No, I have not a drop of what they call white blood in my veins. My father was a full blooded Negro, and my mother was a full blooded Chippewa.

Black people can be the most conservative, the most discriminating. Especially among ourselves. It wasn't white people who said all black men have to wear baggy jeans.

I knew my mother was - well, her ancestry dated back to John Quincy Adams, so she was totally not Latina. She was definitely whatever you call it - white bread, shall we say?

You didn't know whether Chuck Berry was black or white - it was not a concern.

The great joy of doing 'The Daily Show' for me is that I get to sit on the fence between cultures. I am commenting on the absurdity of both sides as an outsider and insider. Sometimes I'm playing the brown guy, and sometimes I'm not, but the best stuff I do always goes back to being a brown kid in a white world.