Jenny Zhang Quotes

Being born, especially being born a person of color, is a political act in itself.

I am Ecuadorian but people felt so safe passing me off as a skinny, blue-eyed white girl.

White people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet.

It must be so nice to be a white male.

There's a lot of ways that white women undermine women of color, and black women in particular.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.

Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom.

I realized there was racism because people thought, 'Oh, if you like roll 'n' roll, that makes you like a white kid.'

I wanted everything. What could you not want when you are brown and Indian-looking in a society in which the white aesthetic is praised as acceptable?

Rock 'n' roll is much easier if you're white.

We have a lot of black Anglo-Saxons. Their skin is black, but their brain is white. When I get real mad at them, I call them 'graham crackers.'

I had this stereotypical view that black people apart from me probably threw stones and lived in huts.

It was rough being dark. I got heat from my own people more than anyone else. I remember going to my mom and saying, 'Why am I so black?' And she said, 'Because I'm black. You just gotta always work harder than the average bear.'

I go out with white women. This makes a lot of people unhappy, mostly black women.

I am viewed as the Negro who has gone outside of the categories assigned to me.

You face racism in small and large ways.

I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

I have never been able to discover anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient - in America.

Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind?

Out of the race must come its own thinkers and writers. Authors belonging to the white race have written good books, for which I am deeply grateful, but it seems to be almost impossible for a white man to put himself completely in our place. No man can feel the iron which enters another man's soul.

Barack Obama is an educated fool. He is viewed as the white man in blackface in the community.

Some white people are privileged, some aren't. Some black people are, some aren't. It's strikes me as, by definition, a racist attack in that it's making a generalization - a negative one - based on skin color.

Freedom in America was not always flat. Racism made it un-flat, so that some people had privileges over other people.

We talk of a rainbow nation - in a country that remains dichotomized between black and white. We must acknowledge that the rainbow, in fact, is still a dream.