Shaun King Quotes

I really just prefer to be exactly who I am, and black is really the closest race and cultural category that represents the essence of who I am.

With my face paint on, I don't look like a regular black dude.

I'm not a Rachel Dolezal. I don't fake tan; I don't have the cornrows, I don't misappropriate. I just want to be Beyonce.

You can usually tell when people aren't being authentic, but that goes for every artist, not just white artists.

What is blackness? Is it the way you talk? Do you got to say, 'Dey this, dey dat.' Or the way you dress? Or is it the forgiving of certain things? What is black enough?

You cannot act a color. Do not tell me I'm acting black, because I'm not. I'm acting whatever you want to call it - urban. I don't even have a name for it. I just call it 'me.'

Don't fault me for wearing a 20-inch blond wig - it doesn't mean I want to be a white person.

I don't want to be somebody else.

I used to joke for years that I was a black man. I adopted the black culture, the black race. I married a black woman, and I had black kids. I always considered myself a 'brother.'

I always give the example, if you turn on the radio today, black radio, Lenny Kravitz is not black. Bob Marley wasn't black: in the beginning, only white college stations played Bob Marley.

Did people think I sounded black? Totally, but that was a marketing tool as well, but also this is how I grew up and these are my influences.

I can't be anybody but myself.

You never want to be the whitest-sounding black guy in a room.

I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become. I'm me, and I'm like nobody else.

You can't be two people in your brain, one rock dude and a dad - there's something in the middle of them, and that's really what you are and that's going to make you the best dad - not when you try to be one or the other.

Everywhere else, we are someone else, but at home, we remove our masks.

I identified with white culture, and I wanted to fit in. I didn't identify with black culture. Like, I didn't like Tyler Perry movies, and I wasn't into hip-hop music. I liked Neil Young.

For me, whenever I would see a lot of 'black films,' I didn't feel represented in it. I didn't feel connected to the characters or the situations or the humor.

Fashion for my mother was about asserting and demonstrating you had aesthetics, tastes, sensibility, manners, beauty - qualities that black people were always trying to prove they possessed, because it was often assumed that we didn't.

I'm American; I was born and raised in America, and I don't want to fake who I am to fit a stereotype.

We're not monolithic. What is blackness? To me, how do you define that?

I am whatever you want me to be and I can't control that. My experience is my experience, but I can't really claim anything. I know when I take my wig off at night and I have to twist my hair up, I'm black. But I don't get too personal most of the time.

I think when I first straightened my hair, I was a teenager. I don't believe that I was consciously doing it to look white or to be on television. It never crossed my mind. All of the girls in my neighborhood got perms and their hair straightened. But I know that historically it was to assimilate and there are some people who do it for that reason.

I am not going to say that only people of color can write people of color, because that means only white people can write white people, and that's not OK.