Bill Cosby Quotes

There were only ever two black kids at my school. I never considered myself to be 'a black kid'. I was who I was. Which isn't to say things haven't happened to me that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't black.

You can't get much whiter than me.

No one tells every white person in this country how to be. No one tells every Hispanic, or Asian or Jewish person in this country how to be. There is no single definition of whiteness or single definition of blackness.

Blackness remains the coat you can't take off.

I definitely am not white.

I think that unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn't real, race isn't real.

Son, you can't go around painting yourself black, you hear?" "Why not, Papa?" "Because they'll take you away." "Why?" "Because you shouldn't want to be like black people or Jewish people or anyone who is...not us." "Who are Jewish people?" "You know my oldest customer, Mr. Kaufmann? Where we bought your shoes?" "Yes." "Well, he's Jewish." "I didn't know that. Do you have to pay to be Jewish? Do you need a license?" ..... "...you've got beautiful blond hair and big safe blue eyes. You should be happy with that; is that clear?

"Race." I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both "black" and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can't take them seriously.

We should not be post-racial: seeking to get beyond the uplifting meanings and edifying registers of blackness. Rather, we should be post-racist: moving beyond cultural fascism and vicious narratives of racial privilege and superiority that tear at the fabric of "e pluribus unum.

Well who's black and what is a black person?

I knew exactly what I was, and there was no hang-up with me. None whatsoever. The fact that the pigment of my skin maybe being lighter brown than other people of my race, maybe some of them, but you know our race has all colors.

What I really hoped to do with my work was to at least be able to define my relationship to race.

Sometimes I read that I'm not 100 per cent Chinese, because I don't look all that Chinese. That's a strange one - I am Chinese.

Many black people I know are proud of the Irish part of their heritage - an Irish grandparent, say - but they recognise that many people believe in a form of racial purity. And it is from that belief that prejudice starts.

People look at me, and they don't see what they think is a typical Aboriginal. I always thought I'd be the white person in a black play.

I never though much about race.

Just call me black, if you want to call me anything.

Everyone knows I'm black. I am who I am. This is the person that Lester Sr. and June Holt raised, and I make no apology for it. At the same time, I'm never going to pull a race card to get what I want. You can't have it both ways.

It's hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once - when I was poor.

I don't see a white woman. I see a black woman, even though my mother is white. Knowing that has made my life easier, I think.

Every single thing in my life is built around race.

Growing up in London, with a hippie mom, I don't know that I'm most people's definition of what a black person is. I'm mixed, yes, but in the world I'm defined as black before I'm defined white. I've never been called white.

We also thought of ourselves in racial and largely ethnic terms.

My dad would call me his Cuban princess because I had really dark olive skin because I was always in the sun; but I don't really go in the sun anymore, so that is why I am so white.

Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.