Patrick Beverley Quotes

I grew up in Welwyn Garden City, and when you're a woman of colour in a predominantly white area, you become aware of prejudice from a young age.

I definitely think the fact that I come from a multicultural background, my mother living life in a white skin and having white skin privilege from the time I was little, I was aware of that.

In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.

I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me!

It is very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human.

I don't think there is enough understanding of how diverse black America actually is.

I know that I am a black man in a white world. . . I know that I never had it made.

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

I grew up in an all-white community.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

I heard about the book and I said, 'Oh my god, I've got to read this book,' and I didn't know that a white woman wrote it. Nobody said that to me, they just said, 'The Help - Oh my god, you've got to read it.' Everyone failed to mention it was a white woman, I think, because nobody really wants to talk about race.

I have never experienced racism in the feminist movement, so it concerned me to think that I was unable to see the subject clearly because I came from white, middle-class privilege.

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.

We need Black supremacy to get Negroes off their knees in churches that preach a white heaven, a white God and a white universe.

This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis ... made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.’

I always describe race as the final taboo in American theatre. There's a real reluctance to have that conversation in an open, honest way on the stage.

It's easier, as a white person, to be silent about racial injustice. It's easier. On paper. But it's not easier on the whole, because injustice affects all of us, whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not.

We live in a society that has a long history of not valuing people of color or women.

I wish Americans understood that race is a social construct, even if we don't want it to be.

It's really interesting when I go into a community where they haven't seen me before because I often get, 'I didn't know you were black.'

College was where I got to actually experience the difference between black and white.

What I remember about race relations in the 1990s is that you showed your awareness by saying you didn't see race, that you were colour-blind.

There are so many shows that are 'white,' and we wanted to talk about how two really delusional, cliche white girls handle racial issues.

That's the nightmare for Elizabeth Warren, because I can attack her from the left. I can say, 'Wait a minute, what do you know about the journey of a person of color? You know nothing. This is all theory to you. Because you did lie. You took advantage of affirmative action.'

As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.