Paula Patton Quotes

I am black, and there's no getting around that, but being black doesn't define every aspect of my life.

Most so-called 'black' people do not feel themselves at liberty to simply turn off or ignore their allotted racial designation, whether they would like to or not.

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.

Have I had experiences by other people identifying me as black and behaving towards me as black? Yes. Just for as long as maybe somebody who was born categorised as black? No.

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

Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.

I never learned how to be adequately black. I never learned how to be black at all.

The very definition of 'blackness' is as broad as that of 'whiteness,' yet we're seemingly always trying to find a specific, limited definition.

By the time I reached middle school, I fully identified myself not even as biracial but just as black.

As a black person, I'm used to going to places in which I might be the only black person that shows up there. This experience has an effect on the way you see yourself in the world and what it means to be black in the world.

When I walk out into the street or go to the toilet, I don't think of myself as being black. Of course, other people think of me as black when I walk into a pub. Obviously being black is a part of me.

I also believe that you are what you have to defend, and if you're a black man that's always going to be the bar against which you are judged, whether you want to align yourself with those themes or not. You can think of yourself as a colourless person, but nobody else is gonna.

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

Race in America has always centered on our mutual agreement not to see each other. White or non-white. Black or non-black. Mongoloid, Hindoo. We've always bought into to the crudest, humanity-denying forms of sorting.

My mixed-race background made me a broad person, able to relate to different cultures. But any woman of colour, even a mixed colour, is seen as black in America. So that's how I regard myself.

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.

There are so many people who have this idea of who I am because I'm black.

I've never been one to carry race on my sleeve, and I've never been one to really use my race.

The perception of linked fate and that feeling of being always on the spot as a representative of the race, at least in mixed company, are features of African American life that predate affirmative action and arise outside of its presence.

I've always had an interest in complicating the way that we perceive the black character, whether it's the black academic or scholar or activist or black intellectual.

I'm black, I don't feel burdened by it and I don't think it's a huge responsibility. It's part of who I am. It does not define me.

Regardless of what I've ever done or will ever do, I'll always be black.

I enjoy challenging perspective - challenging ideas of what it means to be a black man.

I'm fully conscious all the time that I'm an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, 'I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.'

There is a multitude of experiences that make up the black experience.