Kevin Eubanks Quotes

There's always been a quiet conversation and joke that if you're not hard, if you're not from impoverished neighborhoods, if you're not certain constructs of a black stereotype, then you not black.

White people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet.

A smart black guy is confronting for most people. But that's on them, not on me.

I never thought black people would say I wasn't black enough. It didn't turn me into a bully - it just put me on the defensive. I had to watch my back. It made me stronger because I learned how to deal with ignorance.

I think it's impossible to be a young black male from the South, born to an era I was born in, and not have a clear sense of what race really means in the country.

Being black in America - especially as I was growing up - the feeling of oppression, the feeling of being outcast, the feeling of not having a voice was part of my life.

I'm half-white and half-black. No-one will ever say I'm white, but all the road men think because I'm mixed race that I can't be bad because I'm light skin. It's crazy.

You cannot be responsible for Jim Crow. You can not be responsible for racism. This is much more a problem for the person exercising racism.You are confronted with the reality of racism when you go in the streets, when the eyes of others come upon you. [James] Baldwin goes back with you to all the experiences you went through and gives a name to them, and explains why it is like this.

When I was a kid, no one would believe anything positive that you could say about black people. That's a terrible burden.

Race has no genetic or scientific basis.

And I ask why am I black, they say I was born in sin, and shamed inequity. One of the main songs we used to sing in church makes me sick, 'love wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

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.'

Every single thing in my life is built around race.

A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they're better than anyone else on earth - and that's a myth.

Any time I claimed to be white, that would be unacceptable. It just doesn't make sense in people's minds. If I'm white, how can I walk through a department store and still have people scared that I'm going to rob them? Which, that can still happen.

It was an ongoing struggle to say no, I don't want to be a part of the perpetuation of this stereotype.

The Afro-American is not a bestial race.

When you educate a negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.

We [Blacks] wear the mask that grins and lies It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.

Color had been made the mark of enslavement and was taken to be also the mark of inferiority; for prejudice does not reason, or it would not be prejudice

Barack Obama is an educated fool. He is viewed as the white man in blackface in the community.

Most blacks are happy, except those who have had other ideas pushed into their ears.

In America, I feel black with all of the rubbish that comes with it.

The media's image of us is as animals, and we were never that to me. I knew love from black folks.