Kalki Koechlin Quotes

I am half Puerto Rican, a quarter German and a quarter black. That was always a big issue for me - being mixed race - because casting directors tended to be very like, 'OK, are you Hispanic for this role?' 'Or is she going to be African American?'

Even though I'm Hispanic, I'm so white.

My mum is black, my dad is white, and when I was a teenager, people would say, 'So what are you? Are you black? Or white? What are you more of?'

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

When people first meet me, they're always like, 'What are you?' as far as ethnicity. And I've been pegged as 'ethnically ambiguous.'

My blood's not red or blue - it's brown.

I'm not white, I'm not black.

I'm Jewish, so it's like I'm not totally white. I'm, like, gray.

I've got Indian looks, but there is nothing in my background.

I always felt culturally adrift as a child because I'm mixed race. I've had to deal with that since I was little. Who am I? What makeup do I have? What are the black and the white?

I wish I'd been a mixed infant.

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

I mean, people don't know what race I am. They never know if I'm Hawaiian or Italian or Mexican or Spanish or white. I could play Jewish, I could play anything.

I have always, or for the most part, identified myself as a biracial person.

I always wonder if my kids will say they're mixed or black.

My family is part Creole, and we're Indian, and we're also very, very black. My father was so black, he was blue.

I am the daughter of a Chicana and anglo. I think most days I am an embarrassment to both groups. I sometimes hate the white in me so viciously that I long to forget the commitment my skin has imposed upon my life.

Sometimes I have a very fleeting emotional dance with a fleeting phrase, like 'half-Mexican.'

When you're biracial, you can feel like you're fully neither, not fully both. But I won't strip away my heritage for anyone's comfort.

Being biracial is so much a part of who I am that it's almost, 'Let it go already.' It's intrinsic to me. I think a lot of my fans relate to me because they felt different.

My biological dad was Armenian. My last name is Lopez, and I have a darker complexion, which throws people for a loop. My mother's first husband is Mexican. That's where I got Lopez.

The idea that a person can be both black and white - and at the same time neither - is novel in America.

People didn't seem able to consider that maybe both were true. OK, I was born to white parents, but maybe I had an authentic black identity.

In my family, only my brother has a similar skin color. But in Senegal, the color is common.

It's not my place to say how Zoe Saldana perceives herself, and I can't say how anybody else perceives her, either. I see her as a black person of Hispanic origin, but I don't even know what that really means, because I don't know anything about race and Hispanic culture.