Quotes About Race

I was one of three kids of colour in our school. There was a young black brother and sister, and me. So we stood out.

You don't have to be African American to really enjoy 'Frisky Business'. But as far as being black, a lot of people in New York have been stopped and frisked, so that hits home for them.

It is not legitimate that an American citizen feels that they are more likely to be arrested or held to account or stopped and searched than someone else simply because of the color of their skin.

Everybody does good things, but I'm talking about making major changes in the educational system that would impact an entire race. I'm talking about stopping these young gang members from killing one another. I'm talking about keeping prisons from overflowing.

I was eight years old when I got the talk about what to do if a police officer stops me. I was 15 when I was face-down on the curb for the first time.

The people who couldn't get out of New Orleans to escape the storm were predominantly Black.

It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.

Through our Building Bridges dialogues at Accenture, where we have brought together people from diverse backgrounds to have sometimes difficult conversations, such as around race, I have experienced the power of storytelling to help people from diverse backgrounds understand each other.

The Shawshank Redemption' isn't a movie about a black guy and a white guy who become friends - it's a movie about freedom. At the end, the cathartic experience of seeing our own emotions reflected back to us, that's the purpose of storytelling.

Black is confusing. Where does the line start and stop with what is black and what isn't black? People that are mixed-race, or, imagine being from Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, people might say you're black but your features are so non-black, like you've got straight hair, you've got like a sharper nose, or such.

I was asked by an NPR reporter once why don't I talk about race that often. I said, 'It's because I'm a neurosurgeon.' And she thought that was a strange response... I said, 'You see, when I take someone to the operating room, I'm actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn't make them who they are.'

I guess, in a way, I grew up mixed race: half white, half black. That question's always been on my mind: 'What are you? Are you this or that? Are you a white dude or are you a black dude?' In a strange way, music and comedy is kind of the same thing. I'm both. They're just different modes of expression.

Is it worth going into this admission process in just a little more detail? I think so, if only to appreciate the tendency the Italian authorities have of offering everybody a price (to endear themselves to the electorate) and then, since they can't actually afford to give it to everybody, setting up a maze, or obstacle race, to make sure that only those who really haggle for it (not those who need it) actually get it.

If there is one thing I've learned from the years in the criminal enterprises, it's that anyone can do almost anything to anybody else for any reason, and villainy and treachery doesn't have a thing to do with race, sex, species, or creed.

I don't think people have been able to deal with the fact that African American filmmakers can make movies about life and relationships.

There are good people and bad people in all organizations fundamentally however, when you look at the basis of the Tea Party it has nothing to do with race. It has to do with an economic recovery. It has to do with limiting the role of our government in our lives. It has to do with free markets.

Additional research tells us that lighter-skinned immigrants, mostly from European nations, earn around 15 percent more than darker-skinned immigrants, even when all their respective qualifications and markers of personal productivity are the same.

For those of us called white, whiteness simply is. Whiteness becomes, for us, the unspoken, uninterrogated norm, taken for granted, much as water can be taken for granted by a fish.

No matter who was here first, whiteness and American identity have been joined at the hip for centuries; the sons and daughters of England, Ireland, Germany, Scotland and the like, have long been able to look in the mirror and see ourselves as the living embodiment of the American ideal. No matter their prior presence on these shores, the black, brown and red have forever and always had to lobby, petition, plead, scrape, fight and even die for the right to lay claim to that ideal as their own.

We live not only in a racialized society, but also in a class system, a patriarchal system, and one of straight supremacy, able-bodied supremacy, and Christian hegemony. These

Once born, I inherited my family and all that came with it. I also inherited my nation and all that came with that; and I inherited my "race" and all that came with that too. In all three cases, the inheritance was far from inconsequential. Indeed, all three inheritances were connected, intertwined in ways that are all too clear today.

What those inheritances meant, and still mean, is the subject of this inquiry, especially the last of these: What does it mean to be white in a nation created for the benefit of people like you? We don't often ask this question, mostly because we don't have to.

In high school, whites are sometimes asked to think about race, but rarely about whiteness.

None of these attacks by leading members of the conservative cognitariat have been accidental or incidental; neither are they the only examples of blatant appeals to white racial resentment and anxiety that have been seen in recent years. They are, however, a good indication that we are far from the post-racial moment that so many saw fit to proclaim after the election of the nation's first president of color.