Richard Dawkins Quotes

I wanted to separate color from race. Distinguishing color - light, black, in-between - as the marker for race is really an error.

I have compromised down the line. I've disliked it intensely in the old days when you were trying to talk race relations and they would not allow you to talk about the legitimacies of race relations. In the old days, you didn't talk about black, you talked about Eskimo or American Indian, and the American Indian was assumed not to be a problem area.

Race is a very sensitive subject.

People keep telling me about the white race and the black race - and it really doesn't make sense. I played Miami, met a fellow two shades darker than me - and his name was Ginsberg! Took my place in two sit-in demonstrations - nobody knew the difference. The he tried for a third lunch counter and blew the whole bit ... asked for blintzes.

I'm about as Chinese as Herbert Hoover.

My children don't look Hispanic.

I've never understood people who say they're not a practicing Jew. You never hear a black guy say he's not a practicing African-American. What does it even mean?

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

Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with.

I am definitely a person of color.

People always say 'You do racial comedy.' And I don't, exactly. I do cultural comedy. Because race and culture are two different things. There's black people from America and then there's black people from Africa. Racially, they're the same; culturally, they're extremely different.

Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.

I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.

In some cases, the casting directors have casted blindly and have not looked into my ethnic background.

The only thing Oriental about me, is my face.

Your not black enough. If you are black, all you have to do is wear a dashiki and pump your fist, and you’ll get all the money you want.

I hope that when people see Asian women, they realize we are all different. A lot of time with Caucasian people, they just group us together as Asian. But even with different cities in China, people have different personalities... We look Asian, but we still look different. We don't look the same.

The music I like or the football teams I like or the food I eat has nothing to do with me being black.

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

I grew up with so much of the identity of being Muslim and being Arab tied around politics.

More than anything, I'm an American kid, and my music reflects that more so than being an Asian-American. I think it's important but also something that can detrimental to your career if celebrated too much.

People don't contest that I'm British as a black man, but they do contest that I'm English. Too many people are going back to an ethnocentric idea of what being English means.

I've always had to deal with being biracial, even in music. When I came on the scene, I'd go to these record labels, and they'd say things like, "Lenny Kravitz. That's a weird name." I'm brown-skinned and I've got these dreadlocks and I've got this Jewish last name.

It so happens that I never talk about race. I do not know what race is.

While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad.