Junot Diaz Quotes

My hair is my identity.

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.

I don't think people realize why weaves and the cultural appropriation of black hairstyles are so sensitive. It's deep-rooted. For me, it goes back to high school: I wanted to have the long, flowing hair. So I got a weave. But then I didn't want guys to put their fingers in it - you don't want them to feel your weave.

I never thought black people would say I wasn't black enough. It didn't turn me into a bully - it just put me on the defensive. I had to watch my back. It made me stronger because I learned how to deal with ignorance.

I think when I first straightened my hair, I was a teenager. I don't believe that I was consciously doing it to look white or to be on television. It never crossed my mind. All of the girls in my neighborhood got perms and their hair straightened. But I know that historically it was to assimilate and there are some people who do it for that reason.

black isn't beautiful and it isn't ugly - black is! It's not kinky hair and it's not straight hair - it just is.

I did wonder what it would be like if I could have hair.

That something that I fought so hard for throughout the beginning of my career is I didn't want to pancake my skin a lighter color to fit into the... ballet. I wanted to be myself. I didn't want to have to wear makeup that made my nose look thinner.

I am an archetype. There's the fat, sassy, black friend, you know? That's an archetype that exists, but that's not truly me.

I don't like that putdown: that when you're trying to achieve, you're trying to be white. That makes me mad.

As a person of color, I feel like I'm socialized to feel like a remnant of poverty or something primitive, and I don't feel like that at all. I can be myself and be me.

I notice, a lot of white rappers sometimes, they'll feel like they have to be, like, almost aggressive.

There were very few British black women on TV or in music when I was a teenager; when you're growing up, you need someone you can identify with. I remember at Christmas being bought a doll that didn't look anything like me, so I threw it away.

I have not seen 'The Lion King.' I don't do black folklore. And I'm black.

I've turned the annoying questions that white people ask into a career, so I understand that's where I live.

There's this responsibility you feel to present a certain thing that kind of respectability politics. I think that became the only accepted way of defining black culture. I started to become too aware of 'How does this look?' instead of 'Who are these characters?'

I'm not the Asian kid of 'Riverdale;' I'm Reggie, and I just happen to be Chinese.

I'm not a Rachel Dolezal. I don't fake tan; I don't have the cornrows, I don't misappropriate. I just want to be Beyonce.

Oh, talking about private school, man, I had cornrows, and when I picked 'em out, certain people that didn't look like me always wanted to touch 'em. One time, I just said, 'Yo, hell no.'

People have accused me of bleaching my skin, of getting a nose job. They squint at my mom, like, 'I didn't know Wendy was Asian.' I am black all day, honey pie. I am black and very proud.

I guess cause i'm black boy, I'm supposed to say 'peace', sing songs, and get capped on.

You are the antithesis of a racist if you're white and you want to be black and you go out and do everything you can to identify as black, how in the world can they condemn that? That's not fraud. That's good intentions. And as we know, as we've learned, we are supposed to examine the good intentions and not the nature of the evidence.

When I see Facebook, I feel like Howlin' Wolf must have felt when he first heard Elvis. 'They finally taught a white boy to do this.'

"Native" always means people who belong someplace else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows that the white race does not really think they belong anywhere, because they think of everybody else as native.

Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering "who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?"