Quotes About Race

One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.

Typecasting is a thing, but when it involves race, it narrows the roles available to an almost comically small amount.

I grew up in an area of Ireland where there weren't many black or mixed-race children. But I never had any hassle; maybe I've blocked it out, but I don't think so.

If this humor be the safety of our race, then it is due largely to the infusion into the American people of the Irish brain.

If I just point out the fact that black people hurt each other, too, then we can ignore the fact that other people harm black people. I think it's an irresponsible argument.

I'm from an upper-middle class background. But because there was no one of my race where I grew up, I was very isolated. I felt different from everybody else.

Back in 1997, I got to race a Ferrari at the famous Monza circuit in Italy - a dream come true.

If you're a black woman at an Ivy League school, there is no free speech for me because they're already pissed that I'm there.

I guess what really made me a Dodgers fan from the beginning was that the team had Jackie Robinson, the first 'Negro' in the major leagues.

There's people saying that 'Jackie Brown' was a blaxploitation movie, when there's nothing at all blaxploitation about it other than Pam Grier being in it.

If you asked me why I went to jail, the easiest explanation would be to say, 'Because I'm black.'

Even in Jamaica, your own country, coming into youth cricket you need to be from an upscale high school or have a light skin. As you get older you get used to the culture. My club, Lucas Cricket Club, was the only one to accept black people back in the day.

There was all this talk when Obama got elected about how we were living in a postracial world. But we're not. Until we get to the point where James Earl Jones can play, say, George Washington, race matters. You wouldn't put a white actor in blackface to play Othello. You shouldn't have a white actor in what amounts to yellowface to play Asian.

I am a big devourer of James Baldwin.

I always liked jazz. And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that.

Most of the people that I learned and experienced jazz with have been with foreign white people, mostly from France. Excluding my family.

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

I tell you what: I bet Jerry Jones would not trade places with a 75-year black man in Chicago. I bet Joel Klatt would not trade places with a 30-year old black guy from Chicago or Watts. I bet he wouldn't do that. You know why? It's great to know that I'm white and a male in America.

If we've endured white Jesus for this long, then folks can endure a Black Duke.

I don't consider myself Jewish. I am half-Jewish by race but not through my mother.

When my mother left home, her family sat shivah for her, more because my father was not Jewish than because he was black.

We have always policed the bodies of people of color, and black people in particular. The Jim Crow South is a classic example. White flight in the North. School segregation. Gerrymandering.

Ben Carson said black people worked for less. I have breaking news: we built this joint for free. We didn't build it for less.

You go, well you can't joke about race. Well if you're from a different race and that's your experience of the world and you want to talk about that, then fine. Or you can't talk about disability, but disabled comics can talk about that.