Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

There isn't just one black experience out here.

There's not one black narrative. There's not one way to be black.

It is impossible to say with any certainty to which human race we belong. We all differ visibly in the color of our skin.

Blackness is not a monolith. We are not homogenous people; we are not all the same.

I feel like we have so much to add to this book called the American Dream, and I want to add our chapter to it. I want to talk about what it means to be brown American and this concept of what I feel is the New Brown America.

I don't think there is enough understanding of how diverse black America actually is.

My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.

Where I grew up, it was all people who were black and Latino, people who look like me. Now I live in a neighborhood where very, very few people look like me.

It's not even about black and white anymore, because so many people are from mixed backgrounds and mixed ethnicities, and it's just a great time to be able to pull all that together.

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 identity is not based on performance; it's based on something that's pre-determined by someone else, and I don't even understand what that is because I'm an African who came to America.

My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world.

We come from a very mixed family. We're a bunch of different races, my family. So it's very normal for us. I don't know why we're accepted. Are all of us accepted or just me?

If you're of multiple races, you have a different challenge, a unique challenge of embracing all of who you are but still finding a way to identify yourself and I think that's often hard for us to do.

It's an incredible dilemma to be an artist of color and to always be in denial about that, saying, 'I'm a choreographer first and then I'm black,' when in fact, that's not the case. I'm black first and then I'm also a choreographer.

More often than not, we think of ourselves as black, white, Asian, or Hispanic pretty much in this country, but the real America is much more than that.

There's a big difference between race and culture. Because racially, I'm an Indian man. Culturally, not at all.

When it comes to racial issues, I'm very passionate about young girls just loving who they are in their own skin. Because I remember going to an all-white school and being the only black girl in an all-white school, think - looking around me, thinking there's no one else here that looks like me.

My theory is because I'm Asian and white I sort of look like the future. I'm the melting pot.

We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go. At that point, we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland.

Colored people come in all colors.

My whole life is an interracial relationship! It's inescapable. I am who I am.

There is no one American beauty or just one beautiful color in the pantheon, especially in regards to black people - there is no better color.

I know I'm a black actor, but really, I'm an actor who happens to be black.

Iowa is an amazing place. But I didn't have much race around me. I was definitely not like everyone there.