Kanye West Quotes

We have a lot of black Anglo-Saxons. Their skin is black, but their brain is white. When I get real mad at them, I call them 'graham crackers.'

As a teenager, my blackness was also questioned by some of the life choices I made that weren't considered to be 'black' choices. For example, joining the swim team when it is a known fact that 'black folk don't swim'; or choosing to become a vegetarian when blacks clearly love chicken.

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.

People called me 'Iman the black model'. In my country, we're all black, so nobody called somebody else black. It was foreign to my ears.

I was always told that I acted too white. I was always told that I was going to date a white guy - which, in fairness, was true: I do have a white boyfriend. So they weren't entirely wrong, but all of those things were really damaging.

Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde.

I think that, as a black girl, you grow up internalizing all these messages that say you shouldn't accept your hair or your skin tone or your natural features or that you shouldn't have a voice or that you aren't smart.

A lot of black women still carry a lot of pain when they see black men with women who aren't black, and that's really unfortunate that that could make us so upset. It has to do with self esteem.

I had a casting director tell me to be blacker.

The only time my Dad ever said I might have not gotten something because of how I look was when I auditioned for Tyler Perry's 'Meet the Browns.' My dad didn't think I was 'black enough' for the show. My dad isn't the most politically correct person.

I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept. I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.

When 'Raw Like Sushi' came out in the U.S., I wasn't considered to be black enough. They didn't really know where to put me. The music wasn't 'black black' sounding. It wasn't R&B; it wasn't straight up hip-hop, although obviously in that dimension and world.

The idea of 'talking white,' a lot of people grew up around that, just the idea that if you speak with proper diction and come off as educated that it's not black and that it's actually anti-black and should be considered only something that white people would do.

I realized there was racism because people thought, 'Oh, if you like roll 'n' roll, that makes you like a white kid.'

People wanna say that they're part Native American or mixed, or anything other than black. We're raised to believe that there's something better about not being fully black, something eccentric about it. I'm saying I used to tell girls that I was mixed, which is a bold-faced lie!

It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.

I grew up in a predominantly Caucasian community, and most of my friends had blonde hair and blue eyes. So I was always straightening my hair, wearing colored contacts, and I never tanned, if I could help it.

White people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet.

I felt black. I was as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons. They were better musicians, they were better athletes, they were not uptight about sex, and they knew how to enjoy life better than most people.

It's different, it's weird to say, 'She's a white rapper or she can't do this because she's this color - this color does this thing. These are the boxes we have, this is what it is, don't try to change it.' And it's crazy to me because I'm just not from that world, so I can't really rock with it all the way.

How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.

You never want to be the whitest-sounding black guy in a room.

In grammar school some of the girls had problems with me. My face was too light. My hair was too long. It was the black-consciousness period, and I felt really bad.

You know why we're stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don't let themselves feel things.

What is blackness? Is it the way you talk? Do you got to say, 'Dey this, dey dat.' Or the way you dress? Or is it the forgiving of certain things? What is black enough?