Glenn Ligon Quotes

I am struck by how, walking down the street, I'm rarely made aware of my race, but that among journalists, race is absolutely massive.

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

Racial discourses and theories are socially constructed ... but repudiating race theory does not make it disappear in politics. Race matters ... because it functions as a marker and an anchor to establish and repudiate identity, status and position ... Races exist because racism exists.

Blackness better defines who I am philosophically and socially than whiteness does.

I think some people feel that if you question the reality of race, you're questioning racism; you're saying racism isn't real. Racism is real because people actually believe race is real. We'd have to really let go of the 500-year-old idea of race as a worldview in order to undo racism.

I have spent my whole life earnestly believing the fundamental American dictum that a single 'drop of black blood' makes a person 'black' primarily because they can never be 'white.'

White people have basically been encouraged for most of recent history in America to think of themselves as outside of race. White people do have race. They need to understand how their race has been constructed as artificially as everybody else's.

I definitely feel like, in America, even though race is a social construct... there's still a line drawn in the sand; there still are sides. Politically, there's a black side and a white side, and I stand unapologetically on the black side.

The less I talk about being black, the better.

There were only ever two black kids at my school. I never considered myself to be 'a black kid'. I was who I was. Which isn't to say things haven't happened to me that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't black.

The white man's blood and bones have begotten this bronze race, and bequeathed to it in some degree qualities, tendencies, capabilities, such as are the inheritance of the highest order of human animals.

It's been a struggle for me because I had a chance to be white and refused.

Growing up in London, with a hippie mom, I don't know that I'm most people's definition of what a black person is. I'm mixed, yes, but in the world I'm defined as black before I'm defined white. I've never been called white.

Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.

You never want to be the whitest-sounding black guy in a room.

When you're a little kid, you don't see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

The very definition of 'blackness' is as broad as that of 'whiteness,' yet we're seemingly always trying to find a specific, limited definition.

I'm black because that's the way the world sees me.

I've always had an interest in complicating the way that we perceive the black character, whether it's the black academic or scholar or activist or black intellectual.

Race is used, by all of us, in the most manipulative ways, is often force-fit and reduced to something it isn't, to something that gives us a sense of comfort, a false one. Many of us thought - needed to feel - the whole business was 'settled.' But it's not, never has been. Laws have only taken us so far.

What is it to be white? It does mean something to be Norwegian. It means something to be Polish or German or Spanish. But 'white' is simply a catchall for 'light-skinned person.' It doesn't really mean anything.

I honestly realized that my dad was white when someone told me in middle school. They're like, 'Oh your dad's white?' I'm like, 'Oh, my gosh, he really is white.' I knew what race was, but it didn't matter to me.

Our vulnerability is that both blacks and whites can use our impossible racial authenticity against us. Both races can throw up our mixed background to challenge our authority to speak.

There is a multitude of experiences that make up the black experience.

The strange proposition that black intellectuals - regardless of their training - are 'race experts' mainly because they are black is naive and potentially dangerous.