Quotes About Race

I shouldn't make fun of the blacks: President Obama is a personal friend of mine. He was over to the house yesterday, but the mop broke.

Security is an endless race - one that you can lead but never decisively win. Yesterday's best defenses cannot fend off the attacks of today or tomorrow.

History does not record in its annals any lasting domination exercised by one people over another, of different race, of diverse usages and customs, of opposite and divergent ideals. One of the two had to yield and succumb.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.

For a black person who's Senegalese, growing up in France, or a New York Jamaican, that's a completely different relationship with being black and how you might be accepted in that culture or that world. Everyone's experience is different. Especially black women and black men.

When I first arrived in Los Angeles from New York in 2004 to try to break into television, I couldn't believe how segregated it was - how many neighborhoods were nearly all-white or all-black or -Asian or -Latino.

In 2007, a very inspired New York University Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four per cent, were non-white.

I was from a town called Manhasset, very nice town out on the North Shore of Long Island, New York, but there was a little area, predominantly black population, and it was a small school. I played on the basketball team when I was a junior, and I was the only white guy on the starting five, the top seven actually, and we were really good.

New York is great for busy creative types. The city has a pulse that races, and you either keep up with it or you leave.

Every hard working New Yorker, regardless of their income, race, or gender deserves an equal shot at attaining retirement security.

Yorkshire weather can turn quickly. At one Auld Lang Syne race, it dropped to -16C. The frost turned everybody's hair grey. I couldn't take my shoes off, as my laces had frozen solid.

If Adam Sandler does a bad movie, he doesn't bring down the whole white race. But if Tyler Perry does, it's like, 'See what you guys do?' and that type of thing.

The fact is, in the minds of many, Trayvon Martin received the appropriate punishment for a true crime: He was black, male and dared to walk outside. In life, young Trayvon was just a teenager; in death, he has been transformed into a scary, lurking, suspicious, prone-to-violence spook.

Our national history cannot be national if, in the near future, one in three young adults feels their stories remain untold, if this country's long global history of empire and interconnections is marginalised and if the historical reality of race is rendered almost invisible.

I grew up in Welwyn Garden City, and when you're a woman of colour in a predominantly white area, you become aware of prejudice from a young age.

I grew up going to a school where there weren't a lot of black kids. And so my mother, from a very, very young age, has sensitized me to race.

'Driving while black' was taught to me at a young age.

So, I was in a segregated, all black, public elementary school until fourth grade, until my father died. And that's when my mother transferred me to a private, predominantly white school and I saw both sides of the world at a very young age.

When it comes to racial issues, I'm very passionate about young girls just loving who they are in their own skin. Because I remember going to an all-white school and being the only black girl in an all-white school, think - looking around me, thinking there's no one else here that looks like me.

I have two brown boys I have to raise and I have to teach them the inequalities that being a black man comes with. That's a tough conversation to have with a young kid who doesn't see anything, who's always sheltered, who can get anything he wants, who's going to go to the best schools but at the same time he's a black boy and his dad is black.

God made a mistake with me. I'm actually black, trapped in a white body.

I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash.

I travel to Chicago a lot. And I've followed Obama through his Senate race and beyond. I found him to be an exceptional candidate who was able to transcend ethnic and racial lines.

During the canvass in the State of Mississippi, I traveled into different parts of that state, and this is the doctrine that I everywhere uttered: that while I was in favor of building up the colored race, I was not in favor of tearing down the white race.