Quotes About Race

People only say I'm angry because I'm black and I'm a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do.

Since pre-Emancipation, black 'females' have had to fight for the whites-only privilege of being deemed 'ladies': cultured, educated, sexually desirable in a socially respected way. Michelle Obama has managed to get all this without yielding her right to be smart and strong-willed.

I think being biracial is a different experience. I think that, and coming from the U.K., I feel as much white as I do black. And so it's really important for me to address these issues of identity in my work. But also, you know, we're always stronger when we work on, you know, what we have in common. And I love exploring that in my work.

I strongly discourage any intellectuals, regardless of race, from speaking on matters for which they have limited or no expertise.

I am struck by how, walking down the street, I'm rarely made aware of my race, but that among journalists, race is absolutely massive.

Whenever I ask myself what blackness means to me, I am struck by the parallels that exist between my predicament and that of many Western Jews, who struggle with questions of assimilation at a time when marrying outside the faith is common.

I don't know why that is, but English politics is just so overly white. It's very much about the class structure.

We are a society that has been structured from top to bottom by race. You don't get beyond that by deciding not to talk about it anymore. It will always come back; it will always reassert itself over and over again.

I have to show off my struggle so that people accept that I'm black. No matter that every single room I go to, I'm usually the darkest person there... I kind of resent that mentality. I'm just an individual.

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.

My dad's white, my mom's black, and I've struggled with being mixed race.

For me, I've struggled with that when auditioning. Sometimes I get the feedback that I'm not white enough or I'm not black enough, and that can be really frustrating in that sense.

Even the humble black grandmother, who sings in the church choir and struggles to raise a grandchild abandoned to her care, must assert ideological liberalism in order to make others comfortable about her blackness.

I'm an American, but being a black American, my experience is a particular one, my struggles have been particular.

This country is just that great that the opportunities are there for a Hispanic president, a black president or any other race for a president, yes.

I got into the race because I'm concerned for my children, and for the opportunities they don't have. Really, it's for the same concerns that the people of the 16th district have. They're concerned about jobs.

There has to be more opportunities for Asian or black actors.

People who oppose Obama are said to be racists - so I guess I'm a racist.

I still think that we have a hesitance to talk about things racial. And I think we do it at our detriment. We go from incident to incident, and we have spikes in which race becomes something that we talk about, as opposed to talking about race in those less contentious times when I think we might make more progress.

Gays are the molecular opposites of blacks.

White Americans have the option of not having to think about race on a daily basis. People of color don't. Race is a major deciding factor in their lives and the histories of their families.

There's not a whole bunch of options in America for a black man. But sports gives you that opportunity... So where would my life be without football? I don't know.

One of the hallmarks of the American justice system is that it should be blind to individuals' idiosyncratic descriptors, including biological sex, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or physical attributes.

It's not my place to say how Zoe Saldana perceives herself, and I can't say how anybody else perceives her, either. I see her as a black person of Hispanic origin, but I don't even know what that really means, because I don't know anything about race and Hispanic culture.