David Brooks Quotes

I don't write demographically. I don't write a song to reach these people or those people.

When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don't just say white. They give you a math equation. 'Well, I'm a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.'

I like to consider myself an actor who just happens to be Hispanic.

As soon as you say that there is a community called, let's say, black Americans, you've immediately created a boundary line - who's in that group, who's outside that group.

Race and sexual preferences are two different things. One is a behavior-related and preference-related and one is something inherently - skin color, something obvious, that kind of stuff.

My demographic of people have been very supportive.

I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.

My name is Frances Louise McDormand, formerly known as Cynthia Ann Smith. I was born in Gibson City, Ill., in 1957. I identify as gender-normative, heterosexual, and white-trash American. My parents were not white trash. My birth mother was white trash.

I am not defined as a black writer in the Caribbean, but as soon as I go to America or the U.K., my place becomes black theatre. It's a little ridiculous.

A lot people who hear that 'Go New York Go' assume that I must be black.

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.

These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn’t be human.

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.

The United States, we know what happens when we start dividing ourselves along lines of race or religion or ethnicity.

I think we're on the wrong path in this country and have been for a while. People are in their camps divided by region, economic situation, race, religion, ideology. And there's a lot of just staying in your camp using technology to bolster your case without actually debating with other people, without discussing.

Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good.

Dividing groups of people into categories of oppressed and oppressor is a poisonous way to conduct politics in a liberal multiethnic republic. But it’s precisely the way the progressive vanguard believes politics must be conducted to achieve social justice.

One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion. One is not just a man.

One of the things I had to really wrap my head around is I have no control over what people call me: advocate, activist, gay, Filipino, undocumented person, gay person with an Asian face and Latino name.

Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, or Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.

Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.

Everything that divides men, everything that separates or herds men together in categories, is a sin against humanity.

Ultimately all hominids came from Africa, and therefore everyone in America should simply check the box next to 'African-American.' My maternal grandmother was German and my maternal grandfather was Greek. The next time I fill out one of those forms I am going to check 'Other' and write in the truth about my racial and cultural heritage: 'African-Greek-German-American.' And proud of it.

I man don't come red, I come Black

We live in an age of apologies. Apologies, fake or true, are expected from the descendants of empire builders, slave owners and persecutors of heretics, and from men who -in our eyes- just got it all wrong. So, with the age of 85 coming up shortly, I want to make an apology. It appears I must apologize for being male, white, and European.