Chiwetel Ejiofor Quotes

The strange proposition that black intellectuals - regardless of their training - are 'race experts' mainly because they are black is naive and potentially dangerous.

What I really hoped to do with my work was to at least be able to define my relationship to race.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid marveled at the electability of Barack Obama because, unlike previous black candidates, Mr. Obama was 'light-skinned' and lacked a 'Negro dialect.'

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

I'm fully conscious all the time that I'm an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, 'I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.'

By the time I reached middle school, I fully identified myself not even as biracial but just as black.

White people have basically been encouraged for most of recent history in America to think of themselves as outside of race. White people do have race. They need to understand how their race has been constructed as artificially as everybody else's.

Race is not something inherent to one's being: One does feel more or less colored, depending on the situation.

I never really had to put much thought into my race, and neither did anybody else. I knew I was black. I knew there was a history that accompanied my skin color, and my parents taught me to be proud of it. End of story.

Growing up in London, with a hippie mom, I don't know that I'm most people's definition of what a black person is. I'm mixed, yes, but in the world I'm defined as black before I'm defined white. I've never been called white.

If faux liberal white guys want to support and defend Obama, by all means please do so. But I would suggest they try to limit that support to matters of policy and not perspectives on race.

I'm one of those people who is colour blind to a certain degree. And that doesn't mean I'm not acutely aware of race in our country and abroad and in the world. I know what's going on, and I'm very aware of it.

You never want to be the whitest-sounding black guy in a room.

The very definition of 'blackness' is as broad as that of 'whiteness,' yet we're seemingly always trying to find a specific, limited definition.

Most people don't think about race as much as I do. They don't have to.

Blackness better defines who I am philosophically and socially than whiteness does.

I definitely am not white.

To never think about race means that it doesn't really shape your life, or more specifically, the race that you have is not a burden to you.

If I have no idea how my race shapes me, I am probably not going to be open to any feedback about how your race shapes you.

As a black person, I'm used to going to places in which I might be the only black person that shows up there. This experience has an effect on the way you see yourself in the world and what it means to be black in the world.

I consciously learned and performed my race like a teacher's pet in an advanced placement course on black masculinity.

Don't fault me for wearing a 20-inch blond wig - it doesn't mean I want to be a white person.

When you're a black superhero, you can't erase the notion that you're black. If you're black, living in the community, and you want to change things, there are going to be things that happen. That's true of anybody. I mean, you could use celebrity as a similar metaphor.

I'm not a Rachel Dolezal. I don't fake tan; I don't have the cornrows, I don't misappropriate. I just want to be Beyonce.

Never have I once identified myself as white.