Jess Row Quotes

I'm black, and I'm human. I'm a woman, and I'm human. I believe in God, and I am human.

I've always considered myself a person of color.

When alone I am not aware of my race or my sex, both in need of social contexts for definition.

How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people's expectations for our identity?

Drag threatens people because it exposes and mocks identity. Because most people believe that they are what it says they are on their driver's license. But the truth is we are all born naked, and the rest is drag.

This film isn't about "white racism", or racism at all. DEAR WHITE PEOPLE is about identity. It's about the difference between how the mass culture responds to a person because of their race and who they understand themselves to truly be. And this societal conflict appears to be one that many share.

If I'm in a gathering of filmmakers, I'm first and foremost a British Indian; if I'm in a gathering of British Indians, I'm a woman director. There are so many sides to who I am that I change all the time.

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

It'd be really nice to wake up looking like, I don't know, Jake Gyllenhaal and think, 'Let's try this on for a day and see how it feels.'

Here I am, this smart, bookish girl, and I have this biker-chick name.

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

We also thought of ourselves in racial and largely ethnic terms.

I confused gender identity with sexual orientation. Your gender identity is about who you are, how you feel, the sex that you feel yourself to be. Sexual orientation is who you're attracted to.

My name, my real name, is Tracy. I always thought I was like a boy named Sue. So I made my friends call me 'Tray.'

The race is your face. Obviously, I come from a mixed background. Who I am and how I look and being black.

My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.

My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.

I was technically a Valley Girl, even though I absolutely dreaded being called that. I really hated the idea that I was a Valley Girl.

The only thing Oriental about me, is my face.

I am black, and there's no getting around that, but being black doesn't define every aspect of my life.

It was very hard for me, for most of my life, to feel American, or call myself American, and that is a very complicated topic that would require a very long conversation.

My books are not about how it feels to be a black man. My books are about how it feels to be a human being, and part of what I'm trying to sort out is what we mean - what I mean, what you mean, what everybody in the culture means - when they say 'black man,' or they say 'white person.'

I don't really identify myself as white or African-American. I'm just me. I'm Madison.

I'm a walking contradiction on so many levels. I'm gay, black, and a Christian.

I definitely am not white.