Quotes About Race

As an African-American, as a woman, I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down, never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important.

A politician finds anything to do with racial problems far more frightening than a gun.

We don't need another nuclear arms race to proceed a pace and then to encourage other countries to become very, to develop these kinds of capabilities also. This is not what we need.

There's a feeling among white Americans that there's no such thing as racial harmony, no such thing as a positive, productive relationship with people of color.

When every one of your arguments is characterized an attempt to bring back slavery or resegregate lunch counters, it's a little hard to have any sort of productive debate.

If there is a race, it is one to bring the benefits of genomes to human therapeutics. We all want to get there. We all want people to have much more meaningful and productive lives as they age.

People always say 'You do racial comedy.' And I don't, exactly. I do cultural comedy. Because race and culture are two different things. There's black people from America and then there's black people from Africa. Racially, they're the same; culturally, they're extremely different.

Let's put the cards on the table. Real is real. If I was a different complexion, I think people and fans would treat me a different way.

When you cast cross-racially, another dimension is added.

I took one thing to heart that I heard from Sidney Poitier in 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.' And it resonated so much with me. He says: 'Dad, you always looked at yourself as a black man. I look at myself as a man.'

I had a casting director tell me to be blacker.

It's a classic error in American discourse: the conflation of race with culture.

The FBI has had a history of sex discrimination complaints brought against it, as well as race discrimination.

We never discuss race in this country until something bad happens.

Race in this country is still the elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss.

We don't discuss race, so just the discussion of race has become racist. We've been trained that it's such a lightning rod that we don't even want to say the word.

In 2004, there were more black men disenfranchised than in 1870 - the year the 15th Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that deny the right to vote exclusively on the basis of race.

I really dislike elves.

I don't know that white people need to be 'allies' so much as understand that any black struggle in America is ultimately a struggle for the large country. 'Ally' presumes a kind of distance that I am not sure exists.

I was much more comfortable and a much better congressman running in a district that was 37 percent black, where I had to have a white constituency to get elected, than I would have been if I was in a 75 percent black district.

Dallas was a Black and White society at that time; it didn't have the diversity it has now.

I knew there were calls for diversity in children's lit, but you always wonder as a person of color, how diverse is too diverse?

I played Pierre, a white Russian aristocrat, and my co-lead was Denee Benton. Two black leads playing not black people - it was an important moment for the Broadway community to say diversity is possible and it's here.

This nation is being divided into black and white, and the present system encourages this.