Quotes About Race

For years, I've been painting black men as a way to respond to the reality of the streets. I've asked black men to show up in my studio in the clothes that they want to be wearing. And often times, those clothes would be the same trappings people would see on television and find menacing.

It was hard knowing that you walk into a store sometimes, and you're wearing a baseball cap and a hoodie and some baggy jeans, or your skin is a little darker, and the clerk is just staring at you a little bit harder. The cops treat you a little differently.

Baseball is a game of race, creed, and color. The race is to first base. The creed is the rules of the game. The color? Well, the home team wears white uniforms, and the visiting team wears gray.

Around the property I have here, I'm about to put an all weather race track. I'm about to build stables. I'm about to ship over a couple of my thoroughbreds from England.

It is frustrating having to walk through America having to bob and weave people's impressions of me because they see a tall black guy walking down the street. That is frustrating.

What I know now is that I used to not just tolerate but submit to and even on some deep level need our society's web of problems called race, its received and dangerous habits of thinking about and organizing people along a binary of white and black, free and unfree, even once I suspected them to be irredeemably flawed.

When you get into the final week of the Tour de France, it becomes a different kind of race. As the distance and the fatigue really tell, that is when it becomes a proper test of everyone's fitness.

On the RFactor model that comes with the 'Pro-Sim,' everything is balanced and measured. If you go up on the rear ride height, for example, it changes the airflow and the downforce of the car. You learn by trying different things, which gives you a better idea when you're on a race weekend.

I listen to music before every race. Generally, there will be a song I'll get into over the weekend, and I play it all weekend, particularly when I'm getting ready for a race.

In 1984, as a college freshman, I spent a fall weekend at a friend's house in suburban Chicago. His father worked for Beatrice Foods, a sponsor of the Chicago Marathon, and we watched that race from the finish line as a Welshman named Steve Jones set a new world marathon record. I was bewitched by the race and, especially, the clock.

I think music can really affect people's emotions and, when I am about to get into a race car, I definitely listen to music with a good beat - that's when you've got the adrenalin pumping. And the time before you go into a race weekend, you have a lot of emotion and adrenalin, and a lot of focus.

The format of the race weekend is also very well thought out. We have enough practice time to get the cars well set-up and have a proper qualifying session where we can do as many laps as we like, which is great for the drivers and spectators.

When Black Lives Matter started, it was polarizing.

I am not renouncing my blackness and going on about my day. I am rejecting the legitimacy of the entire racial construct in which blackness functions as one orienting pole.

Have you ever heard of Irish, Poles, Germans, Italians and Jews being integrated? They go anywhere and just enjoy their rights. Why call it integration when black folks do the same thing? It's a con job.

I know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Being a woman, we talk about equal pay all the time. We're not talking about if you're black or if you are Latina. I would like to get back to that and improving the relationship between the police community and the community of color. I don't know exactly all the right things to say, but I want to engage in that conversation.

The fact that we live in a world where black people have to strategize so they're not brutalized by police is insane.

I can't think of an experience I've had with police that I felt was based on race, which is one difference between England and the U.S.

The danger to a black child in America is not a white police officer. The danger is another black.

As a black man who doesn't know another black man who hasn't had strange run-ins with police officers, it's impossible for us not to think about whether that could have been us - based on our country, based on our culture, based on our past experiences.

I think that the dialogue between police officers and the black community has to get better, but not better in a way where, 'Oh, let's talk about it when something horrible happens.' The dialogue has to be going on consistently, every day.

We were raised in the black community not to trust the police, and I believe, in the white community, they were raised to actually be a policeman.

The president of the United States is a pretty important position, and it's the ideas and policies that matter to me, not the color of their skin.