Bobby Short Quotes

I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother's employer's family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home.

I've never seen anyone more messed up over success than Richard Pryor. For him, it's a constant battle between success in the white world and keeping it real for his black self.

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.'

There was certainly, like, a rebellious, like, youthful rage in me. And there was also the fact of no getting away from fact that I am white, and you know, this is predominantly black music, you know.

I really wanted to be born a woman. It all started there. A South American woman. And I'm upset that I was born a white Jewish male. I've been angry since.

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 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.

People are so confused about race and hip-hop that people didn't even consider the Beastie Boys one of the greatest rap groups of all time because they were white.

I just always knew that I lived in two worlds. There was the world of my house and community, but to make my way in that white world I had to modify the way I spoke and acted. I had to sometimes not make direct eye contact.

The black world squirms beneath the feet of the white in impotent fury or sullen hate.

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

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

Black art is not some kind of a magic wand: there still has to be a humble heart attached that's listening to it. And I know it's not a wand because plenty of fans love to turn on us as soon as they realize we are actual black people, with black concerns in our black lives.

It really upsets me that the media insists on turning 'Do the Right Thing' or 'Boyz N the Hood' into 'black films.' They are American films. They may open the window on the black experience, but they had things to say to everybody. That's why they were so successful.

The fans called me Jungleman. They said this young guy's not white. He's black in a white man's skin.

I learned at an early age how to traverse the white world, the white-dominant world. I learned, and I was successful at it. I learned the nuances - I learned how to act, how to be - but I always was conscious and aware of my blackness.

I was a black singer with a white voice, a perfect pop voice.

'Crash' is a movie about the racial tension that still exists in America. A lot of us pretend that we don't have preconceived notions and stereotypical ideals about each other, but we do. And we wanted to create a movie about people whose lives crash into each others' accidentally.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong.

When I say, I don't care what white people think, I mean that.

As a black woman who grows up in a predominantly white neighborhood, you learn how to perform a 'good' version of yourself. And then when you're with your home girls, you're saying all kinds of stuff that sounds all kinds of crazy, but you understand each other because you're speaking the way that you're comfortable with.

At screenings for 'Black in America,' I've heard people say, 'Well you know, I never thought you were black until you did Katrina, and then I thought you were black.'

Racism always exists cheek by jowl with, inside, and alongside culture and class. As a rule, it is inseparable from them. That is why, for example, food, language and names assume such importance in racial prejudice.

I'm a suspicious mulatto, which means I'm too black to be white and too white to be doing it right.