Chris Rock Quotes

When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?

Much of the professed concern about the white working class is a cover for the interests of white elites who evoke working-class solidarity to combat racial, sexual and gender progress.

The American idea of racial progress is measured by how fast I become white.

A black President? Now come on y'all, we got Clinton, that's close. He got negro tendencies.

Black people have been qualified to be president for hundreds of years. George Washington Carver could have been president. I could go on with a list of black men that were qualified to be the president of the United States. So the Obama victory is progress for white people.

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.

I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.

'I Spy' represents the absence of the tension of the black man or black woman or anyone of that color walking in, so that the white racist person can become entertaining to a viewer.

In interviews with dozens of black advisers, friends, donors and allies, few said they had ever heard Mr. Obama muse on the experience of being the first black president of the United States, a role in which every day he renders what was once extraordinary almost ordinary.

If you are going to call a film a 'black film' then you have to make a film that represents everyone that's black, which is almost impossible. That is why white films are not called white films, they are just called 'films.'

The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished.

I couldn't have known how vertiginous the entire Huxtable project was. I was, like, 10, 13, 15 years old when the show was a thing. But eventually, I could see that Cliff became a play for respectability. 'This is how you comport yourself among white people, young black child. Take a little bit of Howard with you on your way to Harvard.'

The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, though scarcely anyone seems to notice. All eyes are fixed on people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey who have defied the odds and achieved great power, wealth, and fame.

I think to be very blunt about it, in a lot of that support is a desire for convergence of a black skin with the United States Presidency, with power on that level - the idea is that to have a black in that office leading a largely white country would be redemptive for America.

I always said I'm not disappointed with Obama because I voted for him because he was black, and as long as he kept being black, I was a happy man.

Kanye West does not represent all black people.

I can't wait to see little white kids dressing up as Black Panther.

It's odd to say we had our first African American president before our first African-American-owned movie studio, but we're making progress.

I love seeing black people do normal things, being judged as normal people.

The way we have to measure progress is not, "Is there ever going to be an incident of racism in the country?" It's, "How does the majority of our country respond?"

Here's the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

It's weird because there is progress somehow. But there's so much that just feels the same. How important is that rank? How important is it that I am allowed to make these decisions? What does that really mean? What is progress? Is it progress that a black guy gets to push a button for the nuclear bomb? Is that progress? Maybe, I don't know.

With a black president, I can relax... I can dance in public... I can buy a whole watermelon now.

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