Michael Rapaport Quotes

I'd like to see more crossover between white and black music. That's something I've been advocating for years.

The race factor was just a minuscule part of what I was doing with Eminem. It was really about the music and how well we worked together.

Sometimes I feel like rap music is almost the key to stopping racism.

I am so used to having two faces. A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face.

Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don't think it's given the proper credit. It has changed America immensely. I'm going to make a very bold statement: Hip-hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations.

The greatest hope most Americans - including Republicans - had when Barack Obama was elected president was that the election of a black person as the country's president would reduce, if not come close to eliminating, the racial tensions that have plagued America for generations.

The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they're not gone.

It would be really dangerous for us to assume that Christian hip-hop's popularity equals racial unity.

I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher's well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did.

I've definitely seen huge shifts, but the church is a little afraid of hip-hop, and hip-hop is a little afraid of the church. It's a weird middle area I'm often stuck in.

Whenever you create some sort of disturbance in the air, there's an awakening that happens, an opportunity for a conversation, an opportunity to build bridges, specifically, an opportunity to connect different groups that typically wouldn't connect with one another.

For the American culture to evolve and include Asians is so amazing.

I really want to work with Eminem. I know it will never happen, but I would love if he let me do a hook on one of his songs or he featured on one of my songs. It would be incredible. I've just always admired him since I was young.

In a country that was still racially segregated and prejudiced, music was among the first domains in which African-Americans thrived alongside whites.

We've seen a lot of people come together, no matter the race, and have support of black people. I think that's a huge thing. I don't know if it's going to fix all our issues, but I think it's a step in the right direction. I go out and I've protested, I've marched.

Hip-hop gave a generation a common ground that didn't require either race to lose anything; everyone gained.

It is not enough to live together in peace, with one race on its knees.

Hip-Hop is bigger than the government.

Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.

After my election there was talk of a postracial America. And such a vision, however well intended, was never realistic.

Socially, hip-hop has done more for racial camaraderie in this country than any one thing. 'Cause guys like me, my kids - everyone under 45 either grew up loving hip-hop or hating hip-hop, but everyone under 45 grew up very aware of hip-hop. So when you're a white kid and you're listening to this music and you're being exposed to it every day on MTV, black people become less frightening. This is just a reality. What hip-hop has done bringing people together is enormous.

We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around... when yellow will be mellow... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right.

I think that having a black president in this country has been a seismic shift, in terms of what has been going on racially in America. I think that America is now engaging with how we have come to this point.

I would like to flood South Africa with black personages of all sorts of persuasions: writers, educators, businessmen, you name it. If you are black and have any clout at all, I would like to see you go to South Africa and look for yourself and come back and try to use the tools that you have at your command to try and help the brothers down there.

Any group, any group that can't work with all other groups, if they are genuinely interested in solving the problems of the Negro collectively why, I don't think that that group is really sincerely motivated toward reaching a solution.