Quotes About Community

My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.

I don't want a grand villa in a rich suburb alongside white people where many of my former comrades choose to live. I would never betray my roots in that way.

I was born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1948 but grew up in a black neighborhood. During elementary and middle school, I commuted to a bilingual school in Chinatown. So I did not confront white American culture until high school.

Growing up, I was confused about my identity: I felt like I wasn't black enough to be black, but not white enough to be white.

I remember the day of my baptism very vividly. I was baptized in the baptismal font in the Tabernacle on Temple Square. Those who were being baptized put on white coveralls, and one by one were gently taken down the steps into the water.

In black neighborhoods, everybody appreciated comedy about real life. In the white community, fantasy was funnier. I started looking for the jokes that were equally hilarious across the board, for totally different reasons.

I'm half-white and half-black. No-one will ever say I'm white, but all the road men think because I'm mixed race that I can't be bad because I'm light skin. It's crazy.

Being biracial is sort of like being in a secret society. Most people I know of that mix have a real ability to be in a room with anyone, black or white.

I hated, when I was a kid, being told that 'Black people don't do that.' And the white kids at school didn't accept me because I was black, and the black kids in my neighborhood didn't accept me because they thought I thought I was white.

I always enjoyed playing ball, and it didn't matter to me whether I played with white kids or black. I never understood why an issue was made of who I played with, and I never felt comfortable, when I grew up, telling other people how to act.

I was raised in a mostly white neighborhood. I was this little white girl jamming out to Ella Fitzgerald and Bobby Brown.

At Harvard, I grew up a lot in terms of being able to deal with different types of people because where I grew up in Arizona, it's predominately white and predominantly Mormon families, so there's not a whole lot of diversity.

Do you know, if I go to a Jewish school, them kids are quiet. If I go to a white school, them kids quiet. If I go to a Latino school, they quiet. The only kids that disrespect me is black kids. That's it - my own are the only ones that disrespect me.

Everybody has culture, even white people have culture, but its different with me. So in high school, I was hanging out with the black and Hispanic kids. I'm not hating on white people. I hang with white people, too, but that's where I felt most accepted because I could relate to them more.

Everybody says it: black, white; everybody calls me a legend. Italians, Jews. Everybody.

We slept in the park before we had a house, and eventually we shared a home - my parents, my grandparents and five uncles, my family, all of us - on White Oaks Street by Magnolia Street near the railroad. Those were hard times, but I loved living there.

I'm a white girl and not a white girl, identified by other people as black and not black for as long as I can remember - which, in mixed-people speak, means biracial.

We were from downtown, so we were rapping in Danceteria, in these white downtown clubs, really. Nobody downtown was rapping. Nobody we knew was rapping. So we were like, 'We should do it.' We weren't making fun of it; we loved it, and we wanted to be part of it.

Newfoundlanders, what are we? We're slobbering idiots, slack-jawed simpletons, rustic fish billies living in Dogpatch-on-the-rocks, lower than lower Slobovians, the laughing stock and 'white trash' of Canada.

In this country, there is a segregation of Black Turks and White Turks. Your brother Tayyip belongs to the Black Turks.

I grew up in a predominantly white community - Hinsdale, Illinois - and given that, I feel blessed because I could still count my experiences with blatant racism on two hands. I thought racism was the substitute teacher picking on you because she assumes that you're a delinquent, and she doesn't know you have the highest score in the class.

It was 100 percent music. There was no ego involved, no attitudes, no black and white, it was pure music.