Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

I never have a problem with being black. I have a problem with the easy association of what that means to some people.

Racism is not dead, but it is on life support -- kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as 'racists'

Labels applied to people of any race are inherently offensive.

"Race." I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both "black" and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can't take them seriously.

People approach people of color with preconceived ideas. I don't think this is just restricted to white people, but I think that lots of black and white artists, when race is a subject matter, they put race or the ideology around race first. They don't see the person and the complications of the human being.

The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.

Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.

Taking the line of least resistance, we lump the most different people together under the same heading. Taking the line of least resistance, we ascribe to them collective crimes, collective acts and opinions. "The Serbs have massacred…", "The English have devastated…", "The Jews have confiscated…", "The Blacks have torched", "The Arabs refuse…". We blithely express sweeping judgments on whole peoples, calling them "hardworking" and "ingenious", or "lazy", "touchy", "sly", "proud", or "obstinate". And sometimes this ends in bloodshed." – Amin Maalouf "On Identity

Why hate someone for the color of their skin when there are much better reasons to hate them?

I very much dislike the word "race," and I never use it. I use the word "racist." Race is not a fact. There is only one race: human. Skin color is less than 2 percent of the DNA.

To define each of us by our race is nothing short of a denial of our humanity.

People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman.

If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.

I remember classes in college where the professor was espousing certain theories about how blacks were inherently less intelligent. But I learned a long time ago to give people the benefit of the doubt, not to assume that somebody was reacting to you because of race.

I know I am judged unfairly by my physical characteristics and ostracized because of that so I say, "Yes, I'm a black man."

As for the not-black black president issue - white people can imagine blacks worse off than them, no problem. And now they can imagine blacks better off, no problem. But they still can't imagine black people who are just like them. That's the real problem. That's racism. Not being able to believe that those others are actually just like you.

Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.

I'm racist against non-black people.

Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

I asked him if he ever hung out with black guys in high school and he said, 'Well, no. They always had these angry looks on their faces. Who wouldn't look ticked off having to deal with nitwits like him?

Race is everything.

A white face goes with a white mind. Occasionally a black face goes with a white mind. Very seldom a white face will have a black mind.

Your not black enough. If you are black, all you have to do is wear a dashiki and pump your fist, and you’ll get all the money you want.

If you took away the color of Barack Obama's skin, nobody right now would be paying him any attention.