Justin Simien Quotes

Sure, I've felt racism. I think everybody has prejudice. When I was growing up, the dark Mexican kids weren't allowed in the public swimming pool in Dallas. My light-skinned friend got in, and he laughed at us. It didn't seem like a big deal, because we didn't know any different. So I never ran into anything that actually scarred me.

The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong.

But it is a black man's game, and it will be forever.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized: FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.

A smart black guy is confronting for most people. But that's on them, not on me.

Growing up, at that time, I didn't want to be black because I was bullied, and I'd tell my mum that I wanted to be white like everyone else at school.

As a black man, sometimes you can't tell if what you're seeing has underlying bigotry, or it's a normal conversation and you're being paranoid. That dynamic in itself is unsettling. I admit sometimes I see race and racism when its not there.

Some things you never really fully understand unless you are actually black and you experience how it feels when someone treats you differently based on your skin colour.

I remember one summer I played, like, with the granddaughter of this known Klan member. Like, all summer we caught cicadas. And we had grown close, and so it was, like, time for her birthday party and I said 'Oh, like, what time do I come for your party?' And she's like 'Oh, no, you can't come to my house 'cause my parents don't like black people.'

I'm very light, so some people don't really know that I'm black. I've been in situations where people will say something kind of racist, and I'll step in, and they'll be like, 'Oh, well, you're light.' That still doesn't cut it, buddy.

It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

I love blacks and gays and latinos, as long as they don't live next door.

The only difference between me and those other great Yankees is my skin color.

I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me!

Black reporters are as capable of racism as anyone else.

One of the problems with putting Huck Finn into a movie or on the stage is, you always make the white people stupid and racist. The point is, they don't know they're racist.

I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African American.

There were only ever two black kids at my school. I never considered myself to be 'a black kid'. I was who I was. Which isn't to say things haven't happened to me that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't black.

People think I'm this angry black man walking around in a constant state of rage.

America in its entirety is segregationist and is racist. It's more camouflaged in the north, but it's the same thing.

As a child and a teenager, my attitudes and actions assumed the superiority of my race in almost every way without knowing or wanting to know anybody who was black, except Lucy. Lucy came to our house on Saturdays to help my mother clean. I liked Lucy, but the whole structure of the relationship was demeaning.

Racism been over. It's the old people that keep on holding on to it.