Billy Graham Quotes

My family is very international.

Puerto Ricans are many colors - we are Spanish, we're French, we're Thai, Indian, we're almost black, some of us.

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, the color of my skin and my rather peculiar background as an Ethiopian immigrant delineated the border of my life and friendships. I learned quickly how to stand alone.

It's not even about black and white anymore, because so many people are from mixed backgrounds and mixed ethnicities, and it's just a great time to be able to pull all that together.

I don't want to be a race-transcending leader. I want to be deeply understood as a man, as African- American, as a Christian, all that I am.

Being born in Jamaica, race was never an issue. It was always about the type of person I wanted to be, not the colour of my skin.

I was born in San Francisco. I was raised in Oakland, so I'm, like, super Bay Area born, and, you know, it's just really multicultural up there, and there's a lot of subcultures just from, like, anything, like from rockabilly to, like, crazy punk scenes to, you know, a huge rap scene, and there's just all kinds of things you can do out there.

I am myself of a mixed background.

I think all Latino actors want to be storytellers first. I want to be an actor first, and then I want to be Latina.

I'm a mongrel in the sense that I'm Spanish, English, Latino, Jewish, north, south - all these things are mixed in me.

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

All of us are so mixed. My great-grandfather was white.

Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world.

Every year, my family and I would go visit my mom's family in Texas. We would drive from Chicago to Texas, and once we started to get towards San Antonio, everyone looked like me! It was such a great feeling. Everyone had the same brown skin that I did.

More often than not, we think of ourselves as black, white, Asian, or Hispanic pretty much in this country, but the real America is much more than that.

I discovered that there is Indian blood in my ancestry on my father's side - a fact that had not been talked about in my family. No wonder I've often been cast in exotic roles - Indian princesses, Russian revolutionaries, Algerians, Gypsies and Greeks.

I like to consider myself an actor who just happens to be Hispanic.

There's a big difference between race and culture. Because racially, I'm an Indian man. Culturally, not at all.

I'm lucky because I have so many clashing cultural, racial things going on: black, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee. I can float and be part of any community I want.

I'm very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That's my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it's not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

So many people are of mixed heritage; everyone is from somewhere else.

I'm half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That's why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I've seen so many.

No one tells every white person in this country how to be. No one tells every Hispanic, or Asian or Jewish person in this country how to be. There is no single definition of whiteness or single definition of blackness.