Quotes About Race

For me personally, I have vitiligo, so my whole career, it's always been this very odd debate: 'Does she want to be white? Is she white and black? Is her mum white?' It's always been this question of my background, my race, and what I stand for.

I'm not super-easily offended, but it's a problem when someone's making you feel different or separate because of your race.

There is a demographic catastrophe happening in Europe that nobody wants to talk about, that we daren't bring up because we are so cagey about not offending people racially.

We are in a diversity age. I talk about the lack of diversity for black Americans, but what about the Asian Americans? You don't see them very often. They have a show called 'Fresh off the Boat.' No one is talking about that show. I saw it, and I found that show completely offensive, but I'm not Asian American.

A lot of people said I tried to speak white on the phone. That is farthest thing from the truth and offensive.

A lot of times I go to a comedy show, I sit there and wait for the comedian to run out of ideas and look at me and make an Asian joke. Which is very different for blacks and Latinos. You can't say certain things because everyone is cognizant of when things are and should be offensive. Asians don't have that luxury.

I did tell the census man I was white, and I'm telling you, I started getting offers for the black American Express card in the mail.

I heard about the book and I said, 'Oh my god, I've got to read this book,' and I didn't know that a white woman wrote it. Nobody said that to me, they just said, 'The Help - Oh my god, you've got to read it.' Everyone failed to mention it was a white woman, I think, because nobody really wants to talk about race.

Then we went across the line, and I was like 'Oh my god, we just won the Melbourne Cup.'

Shaker Heights, Ohio is a predominately white neighborhood. It was when I moved in, and it still is.

We're poor black kids from Akron, Ohio. When you tell stories about people like us, sometimes it's going to be considered a social-impact story.

There's no question that I'm African-American. OK? I'm a black man. We're not going to escape that.

Everybody in this race is against Obama, okay? So saying you're against Obama, against Obamacare, all the rest, it's all fine, well and good, except it doesn't move you forward.

I have always been very concerned that Darwinism gave the basic okay to terrible racism and to the idea of murder based upon race.

I think Barack Obama was born into a home not just to a white woman and white grandparents, but a white woman and white grandparents who shockingly told him it was okay that he was black and that he should not be ashamed of it and that he should, in fact, be proud of it.

Aborigines are not just the oldest race in Australia; they are the oldest race on the planet. They look like dinosaurs.

I'm quite excited to think that I will run the Olympic race here next year.

I raced in London in the 2012 Olympics, and it was incredible to be a part of, with half a million people watching and then later seeing kids going back to cycle.

Justice should be one of the things that's colorblind.

We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.

In North America, what happens often is that they put race before nationhood. Everyone here is Hispanic-American, Chinese-American, African-American. But really, we're just North Americans of all these different descents. The only time I notice North Americans becoming national is when a war happens or a crisis happens.

I have a responsibility to diversity onstage, but one of the things I've heard about our production of 'Boys' is that it's a bunch of white guys. Well, race is a component of this play. You can't just drop people in willy-nilly and say, 'Well, we're going for diversity.'

I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It's harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.

I definitely see the genre opening up a lot more. I don't know if black people don't want to get into country music or what, but I feel like we're breaking down barriers.