Jessica Williams Quotes

As I moved to less and less diverse places in my life, I realized that white people don't talk about race amongst themselves!

We don't like talking about race in the U.K. - it's a very sensitive subject. People get extremely defensive and run for the covers, but I believe we have to talk about it.

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.

My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

We are not post-racial. And in many ways we don't even know how to have a conversation about being post-racial. Until we get out of that old-school way of thinking about race and opportunity and the ability to transcend some of the past of this country, then we're going to be stuck in the 20th-century conversation about race.

I definitely think the fact that I come from a multicultural background, my mother living life in a white skin and having white skin privilege from the time I was little, I was aware of that.

In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.

The only way you get to the goal of color blindness is to be color conscious along the way.

White men, seem to have difficulty in realizing that people who live differently from themselves still might be traveling the upward and progressive road of life.

It is very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human.

The race question in America has often been about race, but it has equally often been about power.

Race affects everything that I do, and everything that I create speaks to intersectionality.

I can't say that there's been some big change during my career where all of a sudden everything's totally colorblind.

Part of the desire to live in a post-racial world includes the desire not to have to talk about racism, which includes a false perception that if you are talking about race, then you're perpetuating the notion of race. I reject that.

I wish Americans understood that race is a social construct, even if we don't want it to be.

What I remember about race relations in the 1990s is that you showed your awareness by saying you didn't see race, that you were colour-blind.

People feel really uncomfortable talking about race and identity, largely because the subject is so taboo.

People say, 'I'm tired of thinking about race, it's a drag.' Yeah, well, welcome to my life! I don't care who you are. We have the time and the headspace for this stuff. The least you can do is take a moment.

I'm your typical highly educated, progressive white dude. I've lived my life resisting racism both within myself and in the society around me.

This is what I have learned: Any white person living in the United States will develop opinions about race simply by swimming in the water of our culture. But mainstream sources - schools, textbooks, media - don't provide us with the multiple perspectives we need.

Truth is, some of you aren't interested in a real conversation about race - you'd rather go on the attack for anyone that dares question your aggressive, divisive, and damaging agenda.

I believe that sensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity is important, and nuanced, even more so when it intersects with the issue of free speech.

'Pretty' is most often synonymous with being thin, white, able-bodied, and cis, and the closer you are to those ideals, the more often you will be labeled pretty - and benefit from that prettiness.

There's a bad thing that we have in America, and that is a slow, sticky way that we get out of prejudice. We get out of it very, very slowly. It's like walking through tar. But we're getting out; things are changing.