Quotes About Race

Ah had too many feelin's tuh tell which one tuh follow so Ah didn't cry and Ah didn't do nothin' else. But then she kept on astin me how come mah baby look white. She asted me dat maybe twenty-five or thirty times, lak she got tuh sayin' dat and couldn't help herself. So Ah told her, 'Ah don't know nothin' but what Ah'm told tuh do, 'cause Ah ain't nothin' but uh nigger and uh slave.

Ah was wid dem white chillun so much till Ah didn't know Ah wuzn't white till Ah was round six years old.

Oh, dey put me under arrest one day for vacancy in Bartow. When de judge found out Ah had a job of work. He took and searched me and when he found out Ah had a deck of cards on me, he charged me wid totin' concealed cards, and attempt to gamble, and gimme three months. Then dey made out another charge 'ginst me. 'Cused me of highway shufflin', and attempt to gamble. You know dese white folks sho hates tuh turn a n****r loose, if every dey git dey hands on 'im.

Let me be abundantly clear: I am black, and I am a woman, and I embrace both of those facts.

Why is it when a white actor or even a black actor does a British accent, it's considered art?

I'm not going to be one of those people who says, 'I'm a showrunner; I'm not a black showrunner.' I'm black when I go to sleep. I'm black when I wake up, period. It doesn't affect my perspective on everything, but at the same time, it's who I am, and I'm proud of it.

I'm an African American.

I am a black man inside and outside and you are white men on the outside, but inside, you are Africans like me.

The humanity that is given to other people isn't given to us. There is an expendability that comes along with being African American.

There are as many quality African-American actors and actresses as Caucasians, but it seems that they get a lot more opportunities.

Like I said, being an African-American man, you can tell there's two Americas we're living in. They don't want us to be equal.

My only crime was being born black - or being born black in Alabama.

I'm black. I've been black all my life, and as far as I know, I'll die black.

It's an amazing experience for me, coming from the F1 environment and to see a race like Le Mans.

The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.

I don't think it should matter to the American people what color skin is on their president. What should matter is the content of their character.

Lots of times when you watch anime, the characters all have white skin - all the characters in fantasy stories all have white skin, which I never liked.

I've turned the annoying questions that white people ask into a career, so I understand that's where I live.

Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off so that you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white.

Arizona has always been anti-black.

It's hard to say when or if we will actually arrive at that place called 'post-racial', or, better yet, post-racism.

Whatever that thing is that white people like in blacks, I don't have it. Maybe it's my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don't have it.

if a man such as Samuel could evolve from a common, working man into a wealthy landowner, there was hope for anyone, provided he was white, for Negroes didn't count, and Indians were dead men walking.

How to explain what it was like to be Black to this white woman who wasn't even southern? That a Black child didn't have a right to hate their Black mama? Hatred was not allowed against your parents, no matter what had happened. You had to forgive your parents for whatever they had done even if they'd never apologized, because everybody had to stay together. So much had been lost already to Black folks.