N. K. Jemisin Quotes

There was certainly, like, a rebellious, like, youthful rage in me. And there was also the fact of no getting away from fact that I am white, and you know, this is predominantly black music, you know.

I really wanted to be born a woman. It all started there. A South American woman. And I'm upset that I was born a white Jewish male. I've been angry since.

It is in many circumstances a troubling thing to belong to the advanced class of a backward nation. One surrenders coherence and begins a difficult process of choice which ends, often, in an eclectic idiosyncrasy.

In the locker room, and when I'm with my friends, we use racial slurs... What I do with my black friends is not up to white America to dictate to me what's appropriate and inappropriate.

It was hugely helpful to me, being South African. I have never felt uncomfortable in posh society because I don't see what it is that I'm meant to be bowing the knee about.

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

I'm not a fan of identity politics.

Racism always exists cheek by jowl with, inside, and alongside culture and class. As a rule, it is inseparable from them. That is why, for example, food, language and names assume such importance in racial prejudice.

Writing about identity can be like maneuvering through a minefield, even when considering contemporary figures who have discussed the subject themselves.

I just always knew that I lived in two worlds. There was the world of my house and community, but to make my way in that white world I had to modify the way I spoke and acted. I had to sometimes not make direct eye contact.

I'm doing this play right now, the new David Mamet play. It's called 'Race,' and it's very interesting how people really leave the theater filled with the desire to talk about the play and the issues and the characters, and how they're all navigating their personal views around race.

The defeats and victories for the people at the top aren't defeats and victories for the people at the bottom.

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.

The histories of mankind that we possess are histories only of the higher class.

For all of the diversity in 'Scandal,' no one else would be sitting in a room wearing a T-shirt and chains and call a Southern white Republican president a 'boy.' And it's those kinds of things that Rowan has the freedom to say that nobody else could say within the confines of the show.

I just came back from my hometown, making a movie about a kid who grew up just like me, and it was financed by white people in New York. Personally, I can't be angry. In my personal experience, the support was there.

The idea of victimage is a dreadful thing, a product of a safe middle-class perspective. What people who are not safe develop is a tragic wisdom, a wisdom that embraces contradiction and seeks a sense of balance rather than going to extremes.

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

If the rabble were lopped off at one end and the aristocrats at the other, all would be well with the country.

From a young age, I was rubbing elbows with a very different kind of person and social class, and I felt a lot of tension and conflict in my identity because of that.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.

Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.