Alicia Garza Quotes

I grew up in an all-white community.

I don't feel uncomfortable in America, but every once in a while, I'm reminded that people don't see me the way I see me. It doesn't change my life, but it gives me a consciousness about it.

Everybody comments that I'm white. I'm surprised I haven't gotten more criticism for it. I'm always expecting any day now it's gonna come. I guess I just attribute the lack of hate to people hearing the music and hearing how much I genuinely love it.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith.

It is very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human.

I've been in situations where I was the only black guy. We're in a time now where nobody wants to see that. But it still happens.

I went to a private girls' school where I was one out of five girls in the class who looked like me.

My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

I really wanted to be born a woman. It all started there. A South American woman. And I'm upset that I was born a white Jewish male. I've been angry since.

And I can relate to that, because I went to an all white school, so I knew what that was like. And it was hard at the time, but anything that's difficult you learn from, don't you?

There were only ever two black kids at my school. I never considered myself to be 'a black kid'. I was who I was. Which isn't to say things haven't happened to me that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't black.

'Crash' is a movie about the racial tension that still exists in America. A lot of us pretend that we don't have preconceived notions and stereotypical ideals about each other, but we do. And we wanted to create a movie about people whose lives crash into each others' accidentally.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

We come from a very mixed family. We're a bunch of different races, my family. So it's very normal for us. I don't know why we're accepted. Are all of us accepted or just me?

People are so confused about race and hip-hop that people didn't even consider the Beastie Boys one of the greatest rap groups of all time because they were white.

I definitely think the fact that I come from a multicultural background, my mother living life in a white skin and having white skin privilege from the time I was little, I was aware of that.

A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.

If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.

We need Black supremacy to get Negroes off their knees in churches that preach a white heaven, a white God and a white universe.

There's always been a quiet conversation and joke that if you're not hard, if you're not from impoverished neighborhoods, if you're not certain constructs of a black stereotype, then you not black.

Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world. Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil.

Race affects everything that I do, and everything that I create speaks to intersectionality.

We don't like talking about race in the U.K. - it's a very sensitive subject. People get extremely defensive and run for the covers, but I believe we have to talk about it.

I don't think there is enough understanding of how diverse black America actually is.