Chester Himes Quotes

I'm Asian-American, and I was the only Chinese girl growing up in a white school in San Diego. So I understood what it was like to be different, to always want to fit in and never feel like you ever could.

I'm obviously an American citizen. My parents are American citizens. But I'm not looked at as an American.

To the European immigrant - that is, to the aliens who have been converted into Americans by the advantages of American life - the Promise of America has consisted largely in the opportunity which it offered of economic independence and prosperity.

We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them for our brothers.

I think people respond to truth. 'Straight Outta Compton' made $60 million over the weekend, right? That's not just a black audience. 'Empire' grew every single week. That's not just a black audience. Black culture is American culture, you know what I mean? They're becoming more and more one in the same.

Growing up as an Asian American in this society, there were a lot of times where you feel isolated or out of place as an Asian. And growing up in White America, that's absolutely my experience. And I think that's why I got into acting because I wanted to be anybody else but Asian.

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development.

… the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of western peoples, instead of the most westerly of easterns, that he becomes a racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle.

Italians are Aryans. Jews do not belong to the Italian race..

I identified with white culture, and I wanted to fit in. I didn't identify with black culture. Like, I didn't like Tyler Perry movies, and I wasn't into hip-hop music. I liked Neil Young.

As a man of colour, I've spent my life asking people to see me for who I am. With Obama in the White House, it feels like people have finally caught up to where I've been most of my life.

It's funny because when you're a Welshman living in England, you always get the mickey taken out of you for being Welsh, and then when you go to Wales with an English accent because you were born in Bristol and grew up in Birmingham, they say you're English. You can never win.

When I was growing up in Newcastle, there was one other Indian girl, and we got confused for each other constantly.

In sociology, they call it 'code switching.' I can feel just as comfortable in a room full of people who don't look like me because I understand the social cues of class and race.

A lot of people decide, if you're mixed, you're black. And so they try to force you to choose a culture.

If you say, 'I don't care if Muhammad Ali was a Muslim or not; he was just great,' what you're really saying is, 'I don't care about Muhammad Ali.' Same with Prince being black.

I'm so used to America, used to the traffic in L.A., and I don't really feel it click with the Korean culture. But obviously, I have a Korean face, and I feel like that's just - you know, I can't walk around people like I'm, like, straight-up American. It's like, I'm Korean American. My parents are from Korea.

I'm dark-skinned. When I'm around black people, I'm made to feel 'other' because I'm dark-skinned. I've had to wrestle with that, with people going, 'You're too black.' Then I come to America, and they say, 'You're not black enough.'

The stories I always see about a first-generation kid trying to erase where they came from, or trying to just be white, I would watch those shows or movies and I was like, 'I don't get this.' This isn't how I feel.

You could say mixed-race Eurasians have the exact same struggles as a character like Rachel Chu has had: not feeling at home in supposedly their motherland; not being white enough; not being Asian enough.

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.

The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.

I came to London when I was a year and a half for four years. Since then I have been back and forth. I do mostly feel like a Londoner: I enjoy the Angle-Saxon acceptance of difference and I feel it's more of an integrated society than most places. But this is in London, not the rest of the UK.

I think what matters is that we have to show people that we are an inclusive society that-that-that we want everyone to succeed. And I think there's more that all of us as leaders have got to do to be inclusive with people and make people feel like they're included in society.