Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje Quotes

I've heard that I've gotten a lighter complexion, as if I've bleached my skin. I think that is so stupid and ludicrous. For those who want to bleach their skin, that's fine. I just didn't bleach mine. I'm a black woman. I don't want to be anything but a black woman.

I read so much stuff that black women say, especially about my relationship. 'Oh, he left his black wife to go be with some exotic chick.' First of all, my girl is black: she's Jamaican.

Whatever that thing is that white people like in blacks, I don't have it. Maybe it's my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don't have it.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid marveled at the electability of Barack Obama because, unlike previous black candidates, Mr. Obama was 'light-skinned' and lacked a 'Negro dialect.'

I don't see myself as a 'black actor,' I'm just Shemar Moore the actor. I'm very proud to be black, but I'm just as much black as I am white.

I don't look like a white woman. I look Somali.

I've always called myself a different shade of Brown.

To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!'

Look at my skin - I am not of the white people.

I've been seesawing between not doing too much racial stuff - because I'd rather be known as the funny comedian than the funny Chinese comedian - but at the same time embracing my voice and who I am and what makes me unique, you know, which is the racial background.

My sons are black, and my daughter is Latina.

I don't like the term 'black film,' and I am proud to be black.

Race? It is a feeling, not a reality. Ninety-five per cent, at least. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today.... National pride has no need of the delirium of race.

Furthermore, it is significant that the marked characteristics of this race are being here emphasized most.

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.

Many black people I know are proud of the Irish part of their heritage - an Irish grandparent, say - but they recognise that many people believe in a form of racial purity. And it is from that belief that prejudice starts.

Most of all, I dislike this idea nowadays that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I've visited Africa, and I've got news for everyone: I'm not an African.

I am an African-American in America. That will never change. But I don't have to be defined by that.

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

In Atlanta, with a large African-American population, Sosa is often considered a black man. In Miami and Los Angeles, with larger Hispanic populations, he is a Latino man, and the black label is rejected as robbing Hispanics of a hero.

She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.

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

Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness, and your black presence.

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.

Overall my race hasn't been a problem. I'm a Black artist with White skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what's in your own soul.