Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro - that's the Scotch-Irish part.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

I have always, or for the most part, identified myself as a biracial person. Much to the chagrin of a lot of African-American people that I meet, because it's almost like there's a betrayal, an intrinsic betrayal: "Don't do that, brotha, we need you. We need you here, in this fold."

Why hate someone for the color of their skin when there are much better reasons to hate them?

To define each of us by our race is nothing short of a denial of our humanity.

Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to listen to Hugh Maskela instead of Carole King, just as I was expected to be a radical, not a conservative. I no longer cared to play that game ... The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds - social, economic, even ethnic - yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but that did not mean we had to think alike

'Get Out' takes on the task of exploring race in America, something that hasn't really been done within the genre since 'Night of the Living Dead' 47 years ago.

My folks were English. They were too poor to be British. I still have a bit of British in me. In fact, my blood type is solid marmalade.

I don't see myself a Great Black Hope. I'm just a golfer who happens to be black and Asian. It doesn't matter whether they're white, black, brown or green.

My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child, But I am black as if bereaved of light.

I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming - and it come in ever white child's life - when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites. ... I pray that wasn't her moment, Pray I still got time.

"Race." I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both "black" and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can't take them seriously.

At this moment, then, the Negroes must begin to do the very thing which they have been taught that they cannot do.

I try to attack all races and creeds, except the Irish. Clearly they are closest to the angels and don't deserve abuse. But the others have it coming.

One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.

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

The American Race is marked by a brown complexion; long, black, lank hair; and deficient beard.

Welcome to post-racial America. I'm the face of post-racial America.

The majority of my blood is Asian.

A white face goes with a white mind. Occasionally a black face goes with a white mind. Very seldom a white face will have a black mind.

Always the man on the ground has feared the new comer because he did not understand him. If a white man went into the Congo, he would be hated and misunderstood. That is your lot here. You have a long, long road to travel, an arduous foe to fight, and that foe is prejudice, which we have always had with us. It may be, that without slavery, your race would never have had its chance for civilization. You might still be savages in Africa---and you might be better off there. But still I think that civilization is worth the price we have to pay for it. You'll have to work harder---harder than the white man---because you're on his home grounds....There is no inherent difference between your capacity for growth and that of any other man, whatever his color.

No, I have not a drop of what they call white blood in my veins. My father was a full blooded Negro, and my mother was a full blooded Chippewa.

My husband is half Japanese and half white European-American, and our son is half Korean, quarter Japanese, and a quarter white European-American.

With Othello, Shakespeare posed this problem of a black man in a white society in the role that he's playing. And Shakespeare gave Othello such dignity - he came not from - as he said - not from hate but from honor, from a sense of his own human dignity. And to me, to my mind, there could be no greater character played.

The white race is doomed not because it's white but because of its misdeeds.