Quotes About Race

I've been to the Bahamas before, and it's so crass. You land in Nassau, and the whole island is replete with beauty and culture, but there's a lot of poverty. It is a largely black population; then they build these places like Atlantis and The Cove that are walled off.

You know, 88% of New Yorkers who have died from Covid are people of color. We are not 80% of the New York City population.

What man or woman of common sense now doubts the intellectual capacity of colored people? Who does not know, that with all our efforts as a nation to crush and annihilate the mind of this portion of our race, we have never yet been able to do it.

We're not able to hide behind myths of this being a post-racial society because Donald Trump has outlined exactly how a large portion of America feels.

Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time.

Blacks on prime-time TV are only portrayed as comedians - and often in no better a light than 'Amos & Andy.'

About five years old, I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon and, you know, the black curly hair. That's how I was portraying myself.

There is this feeling among black artists that you have to be really careful. We're not inclined to talk about this stuff because, if we do, we put ourselves in a position where we're not marketable or where we can't win.

I'm African-American. There are more eyes on me than anybody. They're going to take the negative before the positive.

For me, each nuance of a color is in some way an individual, a being who is not only from the same race as the base color, but who definitely possesses a distinct character and personal soul.

There is, for me, as a black woman, as an African woman, a sense of possibility in America that I don't feel when I'm in Europe.

I've been the best player on every team that I played on, so if I can't be the poster child of your team, then what else is it? It's got to be a black-white issue. Every white player I know who's the best player on their team is the poster child of that team.

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

I've experienced colorism in that way: where if you're lighter, then you'll potentially be accepted into society better than if you were darker-skinned.

I think people assume that because I talk the way that I talk that I grew up with money, and then I've had to say, 'No, I grew up poor.' And then I was like, 'Why do I have to play this game where the only black experience that's authentic is the one where you grew up in poverty?' I mean, it's ridiculous.

Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error: error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die. What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?

The causes of crime are very complicated. But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime.

Since the day Martin Luther King was killed, the black middle classes have almost quadrupled, but the percentage of black children living on or below the poverty line is almost the same.

I never considered myself as part of a biracial family - we're just a family - but my parents are white, and my brother is Asian.

When you're Jamaican, you don't consider yourself African American even though everyone else considers you that.

Segregation has never been a shadowy, impossible-to-pin-down conspiracy. It's been an American way of life.

America has a strange relationship with its racial memory. Death has always been a constant companion of black people.

Let's be clear about one thing everyone should know: Affirmative action is constitutional.

I wish Americans understood that race is a social construct, even if we don't want it to be.