Colm Toibin Quotes

Always when you go to a new country and they teach you bad words, you just say them without knowing the value and people look at you because you didn't know that value of them.

Like most reasonable people, it saddens me when I see Americans celebrating a heritage they don't understand.

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.

I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture.

Sometimes stereotyping happens not because of any nefarious reasons but rather because people don't know who you are or where you come from, so they go for the broad strokes about you, your culture, your faith, all that.

I haven't done years of diversity training, so sometimes I say things which are probably tactless, and I don't mean to, to be honest, I don't mean to do that.

In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.

It's barely OK for me to be dressed up as a black guy. But part of me kind of enjoys provoking people.

Americans intentionally deride what people in the Old World hold sacred.

He seems like an American at a carnival ball. He doesn't know the tune. He doesn't understand the lyrics, he doesn't have rhythm, he doesn't know how to dance, and he came without a costume.

Whitey is uptight about offending blacks without really knowing what offends blacks.

Americans have a wonderful way of just butchering everyone's names.

Actually, the only thing that I can honestly say I really regret now is the blackface thing. I did not understand.

Sometimes people can be offensive and not even realize it.

I don't like doing things without understanding the meaning. Once I walked out of a film event as I could not stand the insult they meted out to a Sanskrit verse.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

There was one awkward moment where a black man stood-up to ask a question and out of habit, Bush said 'Clemency denied.'

People see a 'South Park' episode, and there's racially insensitive jokes - nobody bats an eye because they're expecting that in that context. In hip-hop, they don't expect that kind of thing because it's a white person in a predominantly black world.

One thing I'm not doing in my older age is explaining myself to culturally clueless white people.

I might have been lucky to grow up in the 90s, but I think, actually, we started getting complacent about prejudice. We thought we had killed prejudice, and if you were still talking about it you were just going on too much.

The white explorers had been my heroes. The Aborigines, I thought they were real savages. That was what I'd been taught and that's what I believed.

Over the years, I've found that dealing with white people faux pas can be tricky. If I get upset, I could quickly be labeled the 'angry black girl.' But if I don't say anything or react too passively, I risk giving friends and acquaintances permission to continue crossing the line.

At one point, in one of the kitchens where I worked, I was the only American pastry cook. They treated me poorly. 'You're stupid. You're American. You don't get it.' They'd speak French all day. At one point, my boss said to me, 'You learn French or get out right away.'

It was a lot of insensitivity, especially as maybe as far as the 'Africa' video goes. But the song was about a fantasy.

I've done a handful of voiceover and on-camera jobs where I've been asked to 'be blacker.' That's code for sassier, more ghetto, more neck rolls and snaps.