Quotes About Race

'Jack & Diane' was originally about race. I was playing nightclubs, and I was seeing new American couples, mixed-race couples. I thought it was cool. The song was my effort to make a song about that, but of course the record-company guy didn't like it.

When I was at The Orlando Sentinel as a sports columnist, it was embarrassing that I was the only black female sports columnist at a daily newspaper in North America.

This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a majority-African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way.

My mother worked for a white family that lived in one of the mansions on the beach. The husband in the family was a lawyer; he worked for a firm in New Orleans.

So the mayor of New Orleans would have used his own buses had the people had been white?

Black people have, like, this thing, and I have it, we all have it, we have this kind of embarrassment. Where we don't like white people to find out our little insecurities and out little quirks. We don't really like that that much. It's kind of, we're like, 'Don't let them know - that ours; that's for us.'

Medina Spirit earned his Kentucky Derby win and my pharmacologists have told me that 21 picograms of betamethasone would have had no effect on the outcome of the race.

Differences in racial outcomes are not the same thing as institutional racism any more than the fact that far more men than women are locked up is evidence of institutional sexism.

Maybe I'm outdated in thinking this, but because I'm a young black woman and don't see very many being the lead in a film, I have this fear: 'Will I be working?'

I've always liked adventure television. Pre-'Survivor,' I did a series on cable called 'Eco-Challenge,' an adventure race with experts mainly, and here we have 'Expedition Impossible.' I like the outdoors and I like doing something fresh for television you haven't seen before.

The consequences for failure are very different if you're a woman or a person of color than they are if you're a guy. If you're a guy who makes a mistake, you get a second chance. Often, for those of us who are outsiders, we make a mistake, and that's the end of the conversation.

The 'X-Men' stories are the stories of outsiders: people who don't fit into normal society and are ostracised; it's a metaphor for gender, race, or sexual orientation.

I think that, for so much of our matriculation through American society, black people sort of feel like outsiders.

If I was to go around as a white woman, a white man, an Asian woman, an Asian man... the world would just respond to you so differently because of your outward form, right?

Every time you see a black romance, it's over-the-top. There always has to be extreme hostility between the sexes. He has to cheat. She has to show him how independently strong she is, not just as a woman but as a black woman.

The biggest accomplishment, in racial terms, for Barack Obama was being elected. He had to overcome his blackness to be elected. He climbed the Mt. Everest of American politics, becoming an historic first.

I only had a couple of days' practice in the car before my first race. I was very inexperienced. There were a lot of things I had to overcome in my head.

The area where I grew up in Birmingham was very diverse - I was aware of my race but not overly aware of it - and there seemed to be an understanding that we were all very much in the same boat.

I think that - this is my personal opinion - but sometimes African American athletes are considered overly cocky.

The biggest chance to overtake is in the first two laps of a race. Later on will always be more difficult.

1780, as Thomas-Alexandre turned eighteen, the king issued a new law prohibiting people of color from using the titles Sieur or Dame ("Sir" or "Madame"). Saint-Georges remained a chevalier—and Thomas-Alexandre was a count—but neither could use "Sir" before his name without risking arrest.

Recuerdo que una vez le dijo a la raza que leyeran los poemas en voz alta porque la voz era la semilla del amor en la oscuridad.

'Strictly Business' is about a young black man who is learning about himself, and that applies to a lot of young black men, those who are trying to find jobs. This film gives them a good look at that situation.

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.