Jessica Williams Quotes

The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese-American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group. But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention.

In grammar school some of the girls had problems with me. My face was too light. My hair was too long. It was the black-consciousness period, and I felt really bad.

I'm black and white, so either, sometimes, you're not considered by the breakdown of the script: you're not 'black enough' for this role. Or you're not 'white enough' for this role. Or, like, looking up to people, who do I identify with? And not seeing Barbies that maybe look like me.

It's very hard to be a kid, especially in a predominantly white school or white town where other people want to police your body and hair.

I had a casting director tell me to be blacker.

I've lived 16, 17 years of my life in Asia, and that's most of my life. I was born in Asia - I've lived cultures that are synonymous with Asian culture - but it's still not Asian enough for some people.

I love African American women, but I just don't like my skin complexion.

Growing up, I was constantly labeled an 'oreo' by my black peers because of my proper speech and 'valley girl accent.'

I realized there was racism because people thought, 'Oh, if you like roll 'n' roll, that makes you like a white kid.'

I do remember being teased by my cousins on my mom's side for not being black enough. And then I'd spend the summer with my dad and be sent to all white summer camps where I was 'that black girl.'

People wanna say that they're part Native American or mixed, or anything other than black. We're raised to believe that there's something better about not being fully black, something eccentric about it. I'm saying I used to tell girls that I was mixed, which is a bold-faced lie!

I'm Armenian, but I'm very fair and I look white... I would always get such hate about it.

I am Ecuadorian but people felt so safe passing me off as a skinny, blue-eyed white girl.

Whatever that thing is that white people like in blacks, I don't have it. Maybe it's my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don't have it.

We have a lot of black Anglo-Saxons. Their skin is black, but their brain is white. When I get real mad at them, I call them 'graham crackers.'

My father identified as a black man. No one asked him because he was clearly black. But people always ask me. If we were together, people would look at us in a really strange way. It sucked. As a little girl I had blond hair and they'd look at me, look at him, and be disgusted.

My first college roommate greeted me with a shocked silence followed by, 'So... you're black.'

I am the daughter of a Chicana and anglo. I think most days I am an embarrassment to both groups. I sometimes hate the white in me so viciously that I long to forget the commitment my skin has imposed upon my life.

They just think I'm a white dude. Every once in a while someone thinks I'm Jewish. I get a lot of stuff, but never Latino.

People called me 'Iman the black model'. In my country, we're all black, so nobody called somebody else black. It was foreign to my ears.

Black people can be the most conservative, the most discriminating. Especially among ourselves. It wasn't white people who said all black men have to wear baggy jeans.

A lot of mixed-race stories are these navel-gazing, horrible accounts of mulatto tragedy.

I've been told that I wasn't Latino enough, which was code for 'street' enough.

Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde.

When I was studying comedy in Chicago, it wasn't long after 9/11. There were a lot Middle Eastern comedians who were doing bits about hailing cabs and being terrorists. So the first two years, I didn't do any of that because I wanted to separate myself from those guys. But race is a big part of who I am, and it should be a big part of my comedy.