Richard Pryor Quotes

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

People wanna say that they're part Native American or mixed, or anything other than black. We're raised to believe that there's something better about not being fully black, something eccentric about it. I'm saying I used to tell girls that I was mixed, which is a bold-faced lie!

The white man's blood and bones have begotten this bronze race, and bequeathed to it in some degree qualities, tendencies, capabilities, such as are the inheritance of the highest order of human animals.

Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.

There was a while when I was feeling like, 'Damn, if I'd just been born black, I would not have to go through all this'.

White people have basically been encouraged for most of recent history in America to think of themselves as outside of race. White people do have race. They need to understand how their race has been constructed as artificially as everybody else's.

Well, I think that I have a complicated relationship with whiteness because oftentimes, I pass as white, and I recognize that. I would be disingenuous to pretend that I don't pass as white.

The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.

My dream was I was going to be an actor. Racism occurred to me. It dawned on me that I would not be an actor. It occurred to me that I was not white. It occurred to me that being what they call colored, being a Negro, was some kind of a disadvantage.

Race is still real and you got to recognize it.

What I really hoped to do with my work was to at least be able to define my relationship to race.

The less I talk about being black, the better.

I was made fun of in the Midwest - I was the only Asian in my graduating class of 200. Fortunately, I found my niche, and it was fine. But I wanted to be so white, you wouldn't believe it. I was like, 'I want to be white; I don't want to be this anymore.' But now I embrace it.

I never really had to put much thought into my race, and neither did anybody else. I knew I was black. I knew there was a history that accompanied my skin color, and my parents taught me to be proud of it. End of story.

To make an absolutely gross generalization, I think a lot of people feel like if you're mixed, more often than not you're quote unquote white. So if you're mixed, you embrace the mainstream culture more than the African-American culture.

Every single thing in my life is built around race.

If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white - which his genes certainly entitled him to do - his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis.

There was a time I was no longer going to be black. I was going to be an 'intellectual.' When I was first looking around for colleges, thinking of colleges I couldn't afford to go to, I was thinking of being a philosopher. I began to understand then that much of my feelings about race were negative.

I'm black because that's the way the world sees me.

Most people don't think about race as much as I do. They don't have to.

Racial discourses and theories are socially constructed ... but repudiating race theory does not make it disappear in politics. Race matters ... because it functions as a marker and an anchor to establish and repudiate identity, status and position ... Races exist because racism exists.

My books are not about how it feels to be a black man. My books are about how it feels to be a human being, and part of what I'm trying to sort out is what we mean - what I mean, what you mean, what everybody in the culture means - when they say 'black man,' or they say 'white person.'

When I come out of the box, I don't come out of the box as racial.

Our vulnerability is that both blacks and whites can use our impossible racial authenticity against us. Both races can throw up our mixed background to challenge our authority to speak.

There is a multitude of experiences that make up the black experience.