Quotes About Race

When people say Jerry Lee Lewis invented rock n' roll, they forget Little Richard. People talk about Elvis Presley and forget he was singing black music. I don't blame Elvis. It was the music business figuring it could make more money from this music if it weren't presented from the original source.

Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population.

Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to the question of rape.

Perhaps life had a meaning that transcended race and colour. If it had, I could not find it in South Africa.

When I went to live in South Africa, I immediately began to understand what went wrong. Because here was a place supposed to be under apartheid - I arrived there in 1991 - but here a black person had more say and had more influence over his white government than an average Kenyan had over the Moi government.

Remember, we really grew up separately; our life experience was very different because of segregation. So I think comedy is a good space to work those things out and educate everyone about the different experiences and different race groups in South Africa.

I think we've become blind in this country to the ways in which we've managed to reinvent a caste-like system here in the United States, one that functions in a manner that is as oppressive, in many respects, as the one that existed in South Africa under apartheid and that existed under Jim Crow here in the United States.

A 'township' in the U.S. is a small area. In South Africa it's a place designated for non-white people during the apartheid.

I look at South Africa and look around Europe and ask: are those places better to be black than the U.K.? I don't think so. It doesn't mean everything is perfect.

On matters of race, South Carolina has a tough history. We all know that. Many of us have seen it in our own lives - in the lives of our parents and our grandparents. We don't need reminders.

India, Pakistan, China, Singapore and South Korea are heavily investing in nuclear arms. Since 21st century is the century of Asia, Asian countries should be the first ones to drop this arms race.

Mom came from what has been called the poorest place in America - Lake Providence, Louisiana. She was born on the south side of the Mississippi which was mainly African American and even poorer than the rest.

My mother is an African-American from the South Side of Chicago who married a white guy in 1978. She was hyperaware of racism and made me aware of that.

There was a lot of feeling that with an African-American president, life on the South Side of Chicago would be radically different.

We have this film that we hope to finance, it's called 'Southern Rights.' It's a documentary about segregated proms that are still happening in the South of America. So there's a black prom and a white prom, so we hope to finance a film soon about that.

It's not a common thing for a Southern white family to go out and seek their black cousins.

At first I read mostly books by Southern authors - black and white - because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell.

For all of the diversity in 'Scandal,' no one else would be sitting in a room wearing a T-shirt and chains and call a Southern white Republican president a 'boy.' And it's those kinds of things that Rowan has the freedom to say that nobody else could say within the confines of the show.

I'm descended from southern slaves, and I'm descended on my mother's side from northern European Protestant immigrants.

I'm from the South, where if you walk down the street and there's somebody behind you talking with a Southern accent, you can't tell whether it's a black or a white person.

When you say, 'Southern,' or you speak about a southern accent, there's always that drawl, and usually from white people. That's what people associate with the South. But we're all different. The black southern accent is different.

I stand today on this floor to appeal for protection from the strong arm of the government for her loyal children, irrespective of color and race, who are citizens of the southern states, and particularly of the State of Georgia.

For nearly a century, the South made itself believe that Negroes and white people were really communicating. So convinced of this were the white Southerners that they almost made the nation believe that they, and only they, knew the mind of the Southern Negro.

The whole ability to look at the complexity of race and any sort of associated -ism and still find humor, that's a very interesting space.