Arna Bontemps Quotes

White America don't get to dictate how me and Shaq talk to each other.

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.

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.'

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.

Unlike Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Jackie Robinson never tried to convert himself into an acceptable black man.

The music I like or the football teams I like or the food I eat has nothing to do with me being black.

Music is an expression of who you are, and - at least in that sense - I think I epitomize Black Lives Matter. I'm a big black man, and I'm easily misunderstood. Before I started wearing these African clothes, people would assume that I was a threat and that it was O.K. to be violent toward me.

I'm mixed race, and it's often hard for me to fit into period pieces.

I am an African-American in America. That will never change. But I don't have to be defined by that.

I wanted everything. What could you not want when you are brown and Indian-looking in a society in which the white aesthetic is praised as acceptable?

As a black woman who grows up in a predominantly white neighborhood, you learn how to perform a 'good' version of yourself. And then when you're with your home girls, you're saying all kinds of stuff that sounds all kinds of crazy, but you understand each other because you're speaking the way that you're comfortable with.

I haven't gotten labeled as a Hispanic actor.

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture.

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?

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.

Black people can be the most conservative, the most discriminating. Especially among ourselves. It wasn't white people who said all black men have to wear baggy jeans.

As a writer of colour, you have to be victim or perpetrator.

Your not black enough. If you are black, all you have to do is wear a dashiki and pump your fist, and you’ll get all the money you want.

The concept of “the white community” is a monolithic concept that I do not accept.

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

Barack Obama is an educated fool. He is viewed as the white man in blackface in the community.

There's been moments where I've felt, as an indigenous woman growing up in Australia, there's been that kind of rivalry of being indigenous... I've had that experience of someone saying, 'I don't know if she's going to go that far.'

In the locker room, and when I'm with my friends, we use racial slurs... What I do with my black friends is not up to white America to dictate to me what's appropriate and inappropriate.

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.

I'm black and white, so either, sometimes, you're not considered by the breakdown of the script: you're not 'black enough' for this role. Or you're not 'white enough' for this role. Or, like, looking up to people, who do I identify with? And not seeing Barbies that maybe look like me.