Quotes About Ethnicity

I've never understood people who say they're not a practicing Jew. You never hear a black guy say he's not a practicing African-American. What does it even mean?

I am Italian. Springsteen's mostly Italian, too. We're both Italians with Dutch names, one of the many things we have in common.

A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.

Timothy, are you still black?

As early as June of 1981, Brighton Beach was known as Little Odessa, with a quarter of its businesses owned by Soviet Jews.

I grew up in a predominantly Caucasian neighborhood, but my mom is Filipino-Spanish and my dad is Irish.

Asians are nice people, but they burn a lot of shirts.

I had a niche. And my niche was that I was brown. So it's like, 'Great, I get to go up for all these 'brown parts.'' I call them 'brown parts' because that's what they are. That's not to be resentful, because I loved playing those parts - I got to meet so many cool actors.

there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can't even buy a decent bagel. I don't mean to make it sound as if it's all about being Jewish, but that's another thing about Washington. It makes you feel really Jewish if that's what you are.

there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can't even buy a decent bagel. I don't mean to make it sound as if it's all about being Jewish, but that's another thing about Washington. It makes you feel really Jewish if that's what you are. It's not just that there are so many Gentiles there; it's that the Gentiles are so Gentile. Listen, even the Jews there are sort of Gentile.

The Armenians," Bristol wrote, "are a race like the Jews—they have little or no national spirit and poor moral character.

the idea that ethnicity is in some sense an essential or primordial feature is, at least some of the time, disputable, and its use is, much of the time, disreputable.

Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted other than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it's one of the few things binding us together.

True, you couldn't treat an Irishman like an African, white nigger or no.

The Theresa desegregated in 1940, after the neighborhood tipped over from Jews and Italians and became the domain of Southern blacks and West Indians. Everyone who came uptown had crossed some variety of violent ocean.

In 1880, after the assassination of Alexander II, the mobs, aided by the Czar's soldiers, burned and butchered their way through one Jewish community after another, leaving a new word in their wake: pogrom.

Right." He smirked. "The girl with the Irish name who looks about as Irish as I do.

Where are you getting your material—Portnoy's Complaint?" "What does an Irish lass named Monaghan know from Portnoy and afikomens? I imagine you reading James Joyce and drinking

Magellan could seize any Arabs he found in the Portuguese hemisphere

Only when he's left Chinatown, and the faces around him become Black and white instead of Asian, do the flags become more sporadic, the people here apparently more confident that their loyalty will be assumed.

Many a time Russ reached up and pinched my cheek and said, "You should've been Italian." He's the one named me "The Irishman." Before that they used to call me "Cheech," which is short for Frank in Italian — Francesco. After

I was a Chinese American, an ethnic minority so small as to be almost invisible. He was an African American who was very conscious that the blood and sweat of his ancestors had made possible the rapid economic development of this country and who had already embarked on the struggle to ensure that his people would be among those deciding its economic and political future.

However functional at the time, the idea of administering the state through religiously based communities strikes the contemporary observer as outmoded, the product of a different, more religious age. Yet, what then should the basis of identity be within the state? Ethnicity (language) or religion?

Chicano: The poorer, stupider, more assimilated cousins of Mexicans. Otherwise known as a Mexican-American. George López is such a Chicano with his unfunny jokes.