Francia Raisa Quotes

I'm not white, I'm not black.

It's not my place to say how Zoe Saldana perceives herself, and I can't say how anybody else perceives her, either. I see her as a black person of Hispanic origin, but I don't even know what that really means, because I don't know anything about race and Hispanic culture.

It's important for me to think I'm mixed-race.

When people first meet me, they're always like, 'What are you?' as far as ethnicity. And I've been pegged as 'ethnically ambiguous.'

I don't look like a white woman. I look Somali.

I definitely am not white.

I always felt different and it was because I was Middle Eastern. Where most people were very fair, light-skinned, and had blue eyes, I was hairy with dark hair and dark skin.

I, in particular, am in a confusing spot because I am Indian, but I am white, which people don't get. So often I find myself struggling to explain my Indianness.

As I got older, I realised that people saw me as other things - sometimes Korean, sometimes Japanese, sometimes just Asian. When my family moved to a more affluent white neighbourhood, I started to see myself as 'other', this amorphous category. I didn't even know what 'not other' was, but I knew I wasn't it; I wasn't what was normal.

I had an Indian face, but I never saw it as Indian, in part because in America the Indian was dead. The Indian had been killed in cowboy movies, or was playing bingo in Oklahoma. Also, in my middle-class Mexican family indio was a bad word, one my parents shy away from to this day. That's one of the reasons, of course, why I always insist, in my bratty way, on saying, Soy indio! - "I am an Indian!"

Sometimes I read that I'm not 100 per cent Chinese, because I don't look all that Chinese. That's a strange one - I am Chinese.

People look at me, and they don't see what they think is a typical Aboriginal. I always thought I'd be the white person in a black play.

My children don't look Hispanic.

I am half Puerto Rican, a quarter German and a quarter black. That was always a big issue for me - being mixed race - because casting directors tended to be very like, 'OK, are you Hispanic for this role?' 'Or is she going to be African American?'

I mean, people don't know what race I am. They never know if I'm Hawaiian or Italian or Mexican or Spanish or white. I could play Jewish, I could play anything.

The race is your face. Obviously, I come from a mixed background. Who I am and how I look and being black.

I don't see myself as a 'black actor,' I'm just Shemar Moore the actor. I'm very proud to be black, but I'm just as much black as I am white.

Sometimes I have a very fleeting emotional dance with a fleeting phrase, like 'half-Mexican.'

I thought I was half white or something because I only know white people as Ferguson as their last name.

Somebody told me once I wasn't Latin enough, and that made me laugh.

I'm very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That's my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it's not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

My blood's not red or blue - it's brown.

I have an upfront, sort of in-the-trenches knowledge of white people's trying to avoid their whiteness and replace it with something else. When I met my wife, we went through the whole race-slash-ethnicity conversation, and she told me she was Italian. Later on, I find out she's a quarter Italian, at best.

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.

I don't really identify myself as white or African-American. I'm just me. I'm Madison.