Gayle King Quotes

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, 'Look how far we've come,' because we hadn't come very far, to say the least. Although Jackson's population was half white and half black, I didn't have a single black friend or a black neighbor or even a black person in my school.

I grew up in a small town and never went to a Black school.

People don't believe this, but until sixth grade I'd never seen a white person who wasn't with the police or on TV.

Growing up in a school that was majority white, my understanding of the world was that I was different but that differences shouldn't be talked about because it's uncomfortable.

Shaker Heights, Ohio is a predominately white neighborhood. It was when I moved in, and it still is.

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.

My family is Chinese-Taiwanese. I'm from Richmond, Virginia. The community in which I grew up was pretty white. The storybooks you got at school featured white children and an animal, or animals, and as you got older, the novels you were assigned were about, like, the problems of white boys and their dogs.

I grew up in Welwyn Garden City, and when you're a woman of colour in a predominantly white area, you become aware of prejudice from a young age.

I grew up in a predominantly white community - Hinsdale, Illinois - and given that, I feel blessed because I could still count my experiences with blatant racism on two hands. I thought racism was the substitute teacher picking on you because she assumes that you're a delinquent, and she doesn't know you have the highest score in the class.

Most whites live, grow, play, learn, love, work and die primarily in social and geographic racial segregation. Yet, our society does not teach us to see this as a loss. Pause for a moment and consider the magnitude of this message: We lose nothing of value by having no cross-racial relationships.

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black. And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

We’re always talking about blacks as a group and whites as individuals.

Educating Negroes is pointless and dangerous. The state should ensure that tax dollars from white citizens should only go to white schools.

He missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow

My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It's a narrative I never imagined for them.

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.

I think, as a kid, turning on the television and seeing that everyone seemed to be wealthy and white made me feel like an outsider, lesser than. I was not wealthy. I was not white.

We don't realize how much racism has tainted our self-image as human beings.

I always describe race as the final taboo in American theatre. There's a real reluctance to have that conversation in an open, honest way on the stage.

In all my days of schooling, from preschool all the way up to 12th grade, there was not one white person in my class. Literally zero.

It's easier, as a white person, to be silent about racial injustice. It's easier. On paper. But it's not easier on the whole, because injustice affects all of us, whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Happily, the days when overt racial discrimination and segregation were championed by social conservatives are long past.

People in Hollywood go home to their wives and children who look like they do. If you're in that position, your natural thought pattern is sometimes to think, 'Superman, oh yeah he's white.' You can't get mad at somebody for doing that. It's the world they live in and for some, they only live in that bubble.

One of the most important misunderstandings for white people to get over to move forward is this idea that racism is a good-bad proposition - that if we're good we can't be part of it, that being uncomfortable means you're a terrible person. We have to let go of that and understand it as a system we all live in.