Lupita Nyong'o Quotes

And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned.

I love African American women, but I just don't like my skin complexion.

When I was, like, 5 years old, I used to pray to have light skin because I would always hear how pretty that little light skin girl was, or I would hear I was pretty to be dark skin. It wasn't until I was 13 that I really learned to appreciate my skin color and know that I was beautiful.

I've heard that I've gotten a lighter complexion, as if I've bleached my skin. I think that is so stupid and ludicrous. For those who want to bleach their skin, that's fine. I just didn't bleach mine. I'm a black woman. I don't want to be anything but a black woman.

In grammar school some of the girls had problems with me. My face was too light. My hair was too long. It was the black-consciousness period, and I felt really bad.

I'm light skinned, and I used to lean on that because that's something a lot of black people pride themselves on, and it's weird.

Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde.

I think that, as a black girl, you grow up internalizing all these messages that say you shouldn't accept your hair or your skin tone or your natural features or that you shouldn't have a voice or that you aren't smart.

I wanted to be pale. I didn't wanna go in the sun, because I was in school with a lot of white girls. I remember one girl said to me, 'You look better pale.' And I was like, 'Well, you're tan!' She was like, 'It's not the same.'

The lighter the skin, the more acceptable you are. The darker the skin, the more marginalised you become. I want to demonstrate that you can produce beauty in the context of a figure that has that kind of velvety blackness. It can be done.

Blackness has always been stigmatised, even amongst black people who flee from the density of that blackness. Some black people recoil from black people who are that dark because it has always been stigmatised.

I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful.

I'm Armenian, but I'm very fair and I look white... I would always get such hate about it.

'Precious' is so not P.C. What I learned from doing the film is that even though I am black, I'm prejudiced. I'm prejudiced against people who are darker than me.

I went to a predominantly white school, and I was the only black girl. I can remember thinking, 'I don't want to be as dark as I am - I want to be a little fairer.' I didn't want to be me.

In private school, I definitely judged myself against the lighter-skinned girls. I wanted to have different hair. I wanted to fit in. I thought that was more beautiful.

For black people who are really dark - and a lot of black people were averse to be dark skinned - it was believed that you'd be so dark that you couldn't see them at night unless they were smiling or you could see the whites of their eyes. At one time, it was a sharp comic barb that got levelled at some people.

I wanted to bleach my skin so bad, but my sister always discouraged me. She'd say, 'This is a bad thing. Don't try it.'

Me being dark-skinned, that was like a big thing. Growing up, I hated myself. It was, like, weird. Kids are cruel.

When you stand up in the morning, you look in the mirror and say, 'I'm black.' No. You wake up and you see yourself as a human being in the world, but you raise discussion and raise aggression, the anger that you confront every day of your life, whether you want to or not.

I'm half-white and half-black. No-one will ever say I'm white, but all the road men think because I'm mixed race that I can't be bad because I'm light skin. It's crazy.

When I was in the second grade, one of my teachers said, "Where are you going to find a husband? How are you going to find someone darker than you?" I was mortified. I remember seeing a commercial where a woman goes for an interview and doesn't get the job. Then she puts a cream on her face to lighten her skin, and she gets the job! This is the message: that dark skin is unacceptable. I definitely wasn't hearing this from my immediate family - my mother never said anything to that effect - but the voices from the television are usually much louder than the voices of your parents.

A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment

Even if you apply any kind of lotion and straighten your hair you will never be white.

I grew up as the ugly duckling, they called me 'la prieta fea', which means ugly dark one - that was my nickname.