M.I.A. Quotes

I talked about the persecution of Algerians and told about racism in my childhood. And it was as if, after that, I wasn't French anymore.

I served on active duty in the U.S. Air Force and currently serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Yet I still experience people telling me to 'go back' to China or North Korea or Japan. Like many immigrants, I have learned to brush off this racist insult.

There have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, 'Well, I don't want those folks,' even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.

In America, I'm a foreigner because of my Korean heritage. In Asia, because I was born in America, I'm a foreigner. I'm always a foreigner.

You're a white South African, and right away you have to explain yourself. Occasionally, I get hassled until I explain my point of view. I have to make it clear that I don't live there anymore, and I don't approve of the brutal racial policies.

I'm sure I went through a stage when I resented being Indian because in every other manner, in terms of cultural reference points and vocabulary and all the rest of it, I was way ahead of everybody else - so the one thing that set me back was being Indian. And I couldn't do anything about it.

There's a deep-seated paranoia that Americans have about not being Americans or something.

When I was young I was one of the second generation of black people in Holland. My father was the first. My mother was white, and living with a black man at that time and having a how-you-say half-caste boy is not easy.

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy.

[Referring to Italian immigrants:] What did they come here for? Why do not they go back [to Italy] and stay there?

Latins are macho, they hate gringos and they hate gringos’ wives. What else do you want to know?

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War II for no really good reason by our most liberal President. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slavelike inequalities.

I was born in this country. I serve this country every day in my work. I am loyal to this country. I shouldn’t have to state my loyalty. Unfortunately because of the color of my skin and the culture I come from there are some who suspect our loyalty.

It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol, and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea.

A Jap is a Jap. It makes no difference whether the Japanese is theoretically a citizen. He is still a Japanese. Giving him a scrap of paper won't change it.

We’re going to send Mr. Obama home back to Kenya.

I don't think it is wrong, racist, immoral or anything, for a country to say 'we will decide what the cultural identity and the cultural destiny of this country will be and nobody else.’

We can't restore our civilization with someome else's babies.

My parents - they tried to become American, they tried to become British, they tried to become Scandinavian - nobody wanted them, anywhere.

I would never call people that are born in this country who are from Mexico 'terror babies.'

During my childhood in Cyprus, the British talked about the Cypriots as if the Cypriots were outsiders in their own country. And even though I was born in Cyprus, my parents were American, and so I was an outsider in the land of my birth.

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

I've been told to go back to my country so many times, I can't even count.

I've grown up with racism my entire life. I've been bullied, sent to the hospital, beat up, I've been called a Chink and a Gook. Every single racial slur an Asian person can be called, I've been called it.