Quotes About Culture

If you've lived in England for five years, for me, it doesn't make you English.

Once you have a culture problem, it's very hard to fix.

I don't think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country.

There are many great outlets that we love and respect, but 'The North Star' really is going to be a hard news outlet with reporters and journalists, White House correspondents. I think we'll be hard news with some cultural commentary.

Black women don't have the same body image problems as white women. They are proud of their bodies.

A lot of African American women wanted to emulate white women. But I said in my mind, rationally thinking, there is no way you are going to get your hair that straight, especially in the summer.

It took me years to find a program that kept me in shape: Gyms felt intimidating, and women's magazines seemed tailored for toning the bodies of already trim white women.

It's a very confusing experience living as a woman in Japan. If your husband is white-collar, the wife is blue. Even if you marry a person of status, the wife inevitably remains a rung below.

I don't think people in America understand race, and how deep the hooks of whiteness there are in our consciousness.

My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself outside of it. My mother, on the other hand, not only accepted that she would always be an outsider in this country but also believed it to be a finer fate and home than any other she could have had.

If you read some of the recent literature, there is no such thing as whiteness. But we made it up. Not my original thought, but it's true. Because you were born white, you have advantages systemically, culturally, psychology there. They have been built up for hundreds of years. Many people can't look at it.

I have an upfront, sort of in-the-trenches knowledge of white people's trying to avoid their whiteness and replace it with something else. When I met my wife, we went through the whole race-slash-ethnicity conversation, and she told me she was Italian. Later on, I find out she's a quarter Italian, at best.

No one tells every white person in this country how to be. No one tells every Hispanic, or Asian or Jewish person in this country how to be. There is no single definition of whiteness or single definition of blackness.

Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.

I want all types of people to look at my work and see themselves, just like I watch a Reese Witherspoon movie as a black woman and can empathize with her because we have had to internalize whiteness in that way to survive.

'The Cosby Show' was a show about black people that was fundamentally and unequivocally friendly to whiteness and to white people. The Huxtables had white friends.

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

While 15-year-olds in China blitz their peers in the West in math, reading and science, we are warping the minds of our children by indoctrinating them in an ideology that is Marxist in nature and teaches them that America is an oppressive regime of 'whiteness' and anyone born with white skin needs to be punished, humiliated and marginalized.

Jazz is a racist musical form invented by whites to enslave blacks.

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

The whites are the same everywhere. I see them every day.

As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.

The only time you had blacks, whites, and Latinos jamming together was in hip-hop. It's an unsung history.