Kerry James Marshall Quotes

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again." How It Feels to Be Colored Me

I had to say to myself, 'I haven't written enough about blackness, yet it's part of my consciousness and my lived experience.' I had to get over that anxiety of 'I haven't done this before.'

I forgot he [Barack Obama] was black tonight for an hour.

Every day of my life I walk with the idea I am black no matter how successful I am.

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.

Blackness is a state of mind, and I identify with the black community. Mainly, because I realized, early on, when I walk into a room, people see a black woman, they don't see a white woman. So out of that reason alone, I identify more with the black community.

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.

The American paradigm of race requires that there be an ‘other’ - and the other is Black people. That's what makes white people, white.

Stories about race and identity pique my interest for obvious reasons. That's in my body, my brain, my history, my memories - it's all part of my toolbox as an actor.

I'm not a representative of blackness, and I'm not a healer.

Growing up, I remember watching TV, and I didn't see a lot of people who looked like me, especially someone who passed as a glamorous model on a mainstream TV show.

Blackness better defines who I am philosophically and socially than whiteness does.

Growing up I definitely, definitely had a bunch of things of, 'Um, am I black enough?' - and I guess specifically, 'Am I German enough?' Why are we measuring blackness?

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

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

I don't think kids of color should have to search far and wide to find books that reflect their experience.

The truth is, for me, when I was a young black girl who knew I was different, was watching TV, I would always be staring at the TV set looking for myself, and I didn't see me. And when you don't see yourself, you start to think that you don't matter, or you start to think that something is wrong with you.

I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth.

Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time.

I didn't grow up seeing faces of patriots, emotional and raw and gritty, who looked like me.

I am a black woman, and of course, that's who I'm going to be playing, but I'm also biracial, and that's a different side of the experience.

I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.

It's fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility - this too is part of the work, is indeed central to [my photographs]... This invisibility - this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time - is the greatest source of my longing.

Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering "who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?"

The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.