Yvonne Orji Quotes

As a person of color, I feel like I'm socialized to feel like a remnant of poverty or something primitive, and I don't feel like that at all. I can be myself and be me.

Being born in Jamaica, race was never an issue. It was always about the type of person I wanted to be, not the colour of my skin.

I remember people saying: 'You look funny, your hair is so black, you have a flat nose,' but I didn't think of it being racism, and I still don't. But there was a sense of difference, of being an outsider.

A Jap is a Jap. It makes no difference whether the Japanese is theoretically a citizen. He is still a Japanese. Giving him a scrap of paper won't change it.

Schoolkids - black and white - would call me Kunta Kinte as a cuss. If ever my hair was particularly messy, if ever I looked scruffy at school, I would be called Kunta Kinte. My first impression was that it was bad to be African and bad to be associated with him.

So often, blackness is seen in a negative light.

At various points in my own life, I have been laughed at scathingly for calling myself black.

When kids would say 'Ching Chong Chinaman,' I thought they were talking to someone behind me. I used to think I was a white Jewish girl named Rebecca or Rachel.

When I was a kid, it was very common to go places and get racially abused, starting from age six all the way up until you got into the first team.

I remember when I was a kid being called names, including the 'n' word. The first time that happened, it really bothered me. But most of the people I dealt with were all white. Most of my close friends were white.

Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop--you are a Negro! . . . Black is powerful.

Most of the, or I should say many of the negro leaders actually suffer themselves from an inferiority complex even though they say they don't.

Being tall and big was probably more painful than being black.

For black people who are really dark - and a lot of black people were averse to be dark skinned - it was believed that you'd be so dark that you couldn't see them at night unless they were smiling or you could see the whites of their eyes. At one time, it was a sharp comic barb that got levelled at some people.

While I was able to pass as white as soon as I came to America, this was not really possible while I was growing up, as it was pretty obvious that I wasn't 'all German.' So my privilege was that in America, I could conveniently withhold one of my bloodlines and avoid racism and discrimination. That is not a privilege most people of color have.

God made a mistake with me. I'm actually black, trapped in a white body.

I was racially discriminated against for years as a child in Leeds because I was an Italian.

My father is German; my mother is African-American. Growing up, I visited my grandparents in Berlin a lot. I would not see any other person of color for three weeks. People would stare. They would say things like, 'Oh, you look like chocolate - I want to eat you up!'

I grew up eating and loving Persian food, going to school, and everyone making fun of me.

I've said numerous times the hardest job in America isn't being a professional athlete. It's not being a matador or having some job that puts your life at risk. The hardest job in America is being black, because it's the one thing you can't outrun.

I don't want to be 'de-ethnicised.' I hate it when people say, 'Oh I don't even think of you as a woman,' or, 'I don't even think of you as a black woman.' Well what do you think of me as then? A loaf of bread?

I don't identify as white. I have a complex relationship with whiteness.

The fans called me Jungleman. They said this young guy's not white. He's black in a white man's skin.

When you're bi-racial, in the town I was in, in Maine, people kept asking, 'What are you?' It was like I wasn't even human.

For generations, black children have been brought up to have a critical race consciousness, a framework for dealing with prejudice and discrimination, which helps inoculate them against the spiritual toxins they will almost certainly encounter as they come of age in our society.