Quotes About Race

I didn't see myself any different from my white counterparts in school. I just didn't! I thought I could do what they did. And what I didn't do well, I thought people were going to give me the opportunity to do well, because maybe they saw my talent, so they would give me a chance. I had no idea that they would see me completely different.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

Look at my skin - I am not of the white people.

If I had been white with the things I did, they never would have allowed me to get out of baseball.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, 'We're black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we're all brought up differently.'

If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?

I'm black. I'm Latina. My mom is Cuban. Afro-Cuban. My dad is white and Australian.

Social equity is based on justice; politics change on the opinion of the time. The black man's skin will be a mark of social inferiority so long as white men are conceited, ignorant, unjust, and prejudiced. You cannot legislate these qualities out of the white - you must steal them out by teaching, illustration, and example.

I'm half-white and half-black. No-one will ever say I'm white, but all the road men think because I'm mixed race that I can't be bad because I'm light skin. It's crazy.

I've had a black guy call me a honky, and I've also been told that white people smell like bologna.

To be white in America is to assume, with total self-confidence and little afterthought, the personal ownership of public spaces.

But you know, my dad called me the laziest white kid he ever met. When I screamed back at him that he was putting down a race of people to call me lazy, his answer was that's not what he was doing, and that I was also the dumbest white kid he ever met.

I question the political judgement of those who would have the nerve to paint Christ white with his obvious African nose, lips and wooly hair.

The white man is destroying the world.

As a young black woman, I notice at times in the mainstream media framing of the 'me too' movement you see a white female face or a white male face, and that type of questioning and interrogation needs to happen.

The Republicans always do a good job of dividing and conquering. They do a really good job of making black folks, poor white folks, and Hispanics not like each other.

Being biracial is sort of like being in a secret society. Most people I know of that mix have a real ability to be in a room with anyone, black or white.

Some white people hate black people, and some white people love black people, some black people hate white people, and some black people love white people. So you see it's not an issue of black and white, it's an issue of Lovers and Haters.

For the past few centuries, we have defined beauty as tall, slender figures, femininity and white skin.

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.

People didn't seem able to consider that maybe both were true. OK, I was born to white parents, but maybe I had an authentic black identity.

Nowadays, people always say, how come he's doing such young shows? But they never mention The Mod Squad. I was very proud of that show. It's the first time an African-American guy kissed a white girl.

If I was a white rapper, the bar for me would be Eminem. Of course his white skin helped him excel to heights that a lot of other rappers couldn't, but he still was talented. People gravitated towards him because of his skills. He stood the test of time.

There was not a single Negro slave owner who did not know dozens of Negroes just as capable of learning and efficiency as the mass of poor white people around and about, and some quite as capable as the average slaveholder. They had continually, in the course of the history of slavery, recognized such men.