Chris Cleave Quotes

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.

I may be brown on the outside, but on the inside, I'm all American.

I'm not the Asian kid of 'Riverdale;' I'm Reggie, and I just happen to be Chinese.

I was the only black girl at my junior high school. I had an afro, a Jamaican accent, I looked really old.

The race is your face. Obviously, I come from a mixed background. Who I am and how I look and being black.

I'm very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That's my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it's not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

Most of us, when imagining an All-American, wouldn't picture a man who looked like me. Not even I would.

There was [ in New York] - some of it was this perception of the Midwest that I realized in this multicultural city that - and I don't think it's as true as it was - but everyone was kind of like, what, are you Jewish? Are you Italian? What are you? You know, are you black? Are you da-da-da? Are you Puerto Rican? And so I ended up - my ethnic identity was Midwestern, was white bread. And so it informed a lot of my stand-up.

I'm very happy to have the heritage that I do, but I'm not wanting to be 'the Latino actor.' I just want to be 'an actor.'

I'm not stereotypically Canadian. I don't really follow hockey. I don't feel like anything other than myself, basically.

Wherever I go, people ask: 'What is she? What is she?' There has always been an agenda - they're excluding me or including me in something with that question. It is the first thing agents in Los Angeles ask me. And then I'd hear: 'You're not black enough, you're too black, you're Italian - no, you're Spanish.'

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.

I'm a little bit of everything. Sometimes people think I'm not Puerto Rican, because my name doesn't sound Spanish.

My children don't look Hispanic.

I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.

Not only do I not want to be stereotyped as this Asian girl who fights - gee, what a wonder - but also I have more to offer than that.

I'm 100 percent Irish by birth, grew up Italian, and yet I constantly get cast as playing Jewish.

I am Ecuadorian but people felt so safe passing me off as a skinny, blue-eyed white girl.

Being born in Jamaica, race was never an issue. It was always about the type of person I wanted to be, not the colour of my skin.

Mostly I'm proud to be an African-American woman, but I'm glad I have a universal look as well.

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

I am myself of a mixed background.

The girl next door isn't necessarily blonde and blue-eyed anymore. So I don't feel like I need to morph into that all-American thing.

It's strange; when I was younger and people would ask, 'Where are you from?', I'd say, 'West Africa', which was odd because I'm obviously not African, but it was my home.

I am definitely a person of color.