Sherman Alexie Quotes

I know that I am a black man in a white world. . . I know that I never had it made.

The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate's career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.

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

I think of the described dynamics as a fluid negotiation. I don't think these specific interactions can happen to the black or brown body without the white body. And there are ways in which, if you say, "Oh, this happened to me," then the white body can say, "Well, it happened to her and it has nothing to do with me." But if it says "you," that you is an apparent part of the encounter.

I'm not black, but there's a whole lot of times I wish I could say I'm not white.

Mostly I'm interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

Whites they pretended to ignore, as they busily lived mirror-image white lives.

Sometimes people of color walk into these spaces that are dominated by the dominant culture, and we have to be better, not make as much trouble.

You can be poor, middle class, or rich - it doesn't matter. The black card will still confer upon you an entire history of oppression, even if you've never been oppressed. Flash the black card, and most white people will cower.

Definitely the Korean culture is very strong to me, and I grew up in Hawaii where Asian-Americans are the dominant culture, but I never thought of myself as the minority.

I have spent years studying what it means to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet is deeply divided by race.

I've been to so many parties in England and in America that's exactly like that, where you're kind of, like, seen as Other. When you're just living your life, and you have to adopt the Other in order to understand and navigate the society.

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.

I was wowed by Margo Jefferson's memoir, Negroland, which is about growing up black and privileged in Chicago in the fifties and sixties. It was a window into an alien world. Obviously, I'm not black, but what was really alien to me was her family's focus on respectability. I was never taught when to wear white gloves, what length skirt is appropriate.

You are the antithesis of a racist if you're white and you want to be black and you go out and do everything you can to identify as black, how in the world can they condemn that? That's not fraud. That's good intentions. And as we know, as we've learned, we are supposed to examine the good intentions and not the nature of the evidence.

I have never felt the pain of not being white the way I've felt it since I've been a public figure/part of this entertainment industry.

We are still conditioning people in this country and, indeed, all over the globe to the myth of white superiority. We are constantly being told that we don't have racism in this country anymore, but most of the people who are saying that are white. White people think it isn't happening because it isn't happening to them.

The Negro loves America enough to criticize her fundamentally. Most white Americans simply can't be bothered.

I think it's extremely important to challenge white brothers and sisters and think more systematically and strategically about the whiteness that they possess.

I don't have a problem with being black in a white country or being with my people.

To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica's black mass.

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.

He [liberal white person] may stand with you through thin, but not thick; when the chips are down, you'll find that as fixed in him as his bone structure is his sometimes subconscious conviction that he's better than anybody black.

Why must we always talk about race anyway? Can't we just be human beings? And Professor Hunk replied - that is exactly what white privilege is, that you can say that. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.

If you've been preached to, if you've been educated, if you've been raised to believe that America is the most racist, the most disgustingly vile nation in the history of the world, and you are white, then you can inoculate yourself. You can immunize yourself from being associated with that aspect of American history because you are white, by becoming anti-American, anti-this and anti-that.