William Finnegan Quotes

When I lived in England my perception of what people thought of me was largely formed by the media.

I do think that when you're specifically working in a country like South Africa, you have to be able to be aware of the cultural truth of what people are raised in and believe in and how they function within their society.

There were so few black men who were successful and who successfully conveyed black male fear - how America can make you feel crazy, and how America can create interesting levels of contradiction.

I don't think we're getting the empathy, and identifying with the situations that many African Americans experience. That's the problem with how the story is being reported.

Imagine Americans who go to Paris. Why would you want to go where someone's going to disparage you? Why would you go anywhere where they treat you bad? Well, that's how it is for us to go to Mexico. You have to be on your guard, because I think the Mexicans are harder on the Mexicans, the Mexican-Americans. They don't see us as Mexican. I think part of it's a class issue and a color issue. We're more connected to their servants, so what are we doing staying at a nice hotel? There's a kind of shame.

I never have a problem with being black. I have a problem with the easy association of what that means to some people.

The weird thing is, in America, people were saying, "You're not going to get recognized because all you're going to see is basically your forehead and eyes."

The South African native is probably the one impossible person to train in the entire world; he is probably impossible by any human standard.

I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, I was involved in what the Negroes, I mean, blacks were thinking, what they were feeling.

[T]he courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.... The mere fact that a school is black does not mean that it is the product of an unconstitutional violation.

I know I am judged unfairly by my physical characteristics and ostracized because of that so I say, "Yes, I'm a black man."

You have the upper class Negroes who are the modern day Uncle Toms or the 20th century Uncle Toms. They don't wear a handkerchief anymore. They wear top hats. They're called Doctor, they're called - Reverend, but they're still - they play the same role today that Uncle Tom played on the plantation.

Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar's own figuring, hardly human at all.

I think I was just too young to even understand what was going on. When I was still living in South Africa, there was still so much racial tension.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

I was raised to believe that you had to do things better than white people in order to succeed. The old black shows were better than the white shows. "The Jeffersons" (1975) was a lot better. "Good Times" (1974) was way funnier. "Sanford and Son" (1972). Now, though, everyone thinks we're equal, so we submit the same shit that everyone else submits. And then we get mad when they won't air it. You got to go back to the old attitude of it has to be twice as good.

I grew during segregation in an all-black segregated neighborhood with segregated schools, etcetera. I was raised by a great father, my hero, who I much admired. So, I never really had anxiety in the way that someone like Obama would have. When he walks down the street alone, since no one knows who his mother is, they're just going to see him as a black guy.

I don't think that anyone has been really created more by the white press than the civil right leaders.

Nowadays, you suffer the same risks - ostracism, career loss, possible assault - for being perceived as racist that you would have encountered a century ago for daring to question racist ideology.

Why is she afraid?" he asked. "She's not Anjin-san. Just a little nervous. Please excuse her. She's never seen a foreigner close to before." "Tell her when the moon's full, barbarians sprout horns and fire comes out of our mouths like dragons.

Race is a part of every conversation in America, whether you know it or not.

I need to conduct myself differently in different communities. In my experience, the journalistic conventions - you know, I'm the reporter, you're the subject, the interviewee - actually tend to hold steady much more consistently in rural Africa than they do in the American inner city.

Well, there were definitely elements of my rise in radio that had to do with my being black. But going back as far as Walter Winchell, Army Archerd and Hedda Hopper, legendary wags would grab a radio microphone and talk about what Errol Flynn and other stars were up to.

There is a political and racial context behind everything that I do. Not always because I design it that way, or because I want it that way, but rather because it's just the way people look at the work of an African-American artist in this country.

As for the not-black black president issue - white people can imagine blacks worse off than them, no problem. And now they can imagine blacks better off, no problem. But they still can't imagine black people who are just like them. That's the real problem. That's racism. Not being able to believe that those others are actually just like you.