Morgan Freeman Quotes

Ultimately all hominids came from Africa, and therefore everyone in America should simply check the box next to 'African-American.' My maternal grandmother was German and my maternal grandfather was Greek. The next time I fill out one of those forms I am going to check 'Other' and write in the truth about my racial and cultural heritage: 'African-Greek-German-American.' And proud of it.

The truth is, no man is white and no man is black. We are all freckled.

The privileged position of whiteness doesn't allow for someone with one drop of Negro blood to be considered white, which allows whiteness to be a fairly pure category while blackness has to absorb an expansive reality of representation.

I think there's a sort of, you know, very thin way of reading this that says, well, Barack Obama is biracial thus that gives him some understanding of both white America and black America, but that's not really it.

Being of color in America by no means amounts to a constant barrage of negativity. However, unlike being white, being of color means one's race is a constant issue.

Sometimes I even feel funny to say I'm in a biracial marriage because people are like, 'Oh, he's Asian?' The subtext is, 'Who cares? You didn't marry a black person.'

My mixed-race background made me a broad person, able to relate to different cultures. But any woman of colour, even a mixed colour, is seen as black in America. So that's how I regard myself.

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.

You know, I don't play the race card a lot. I'm half-black, half-white, and I'm proud of - my skin is brown. The world sees me as a black man, but my mother didn't raise me as a black man. She didn't raise me as a white guy.

There is nothing radical about Obama except the fact of who he is.

The first thing I ever heard about Barack Obama was that he had a white mother and a black father. Interestingly, the person who informed me of this spoke only matter-of-factly, with no hint of the gossip's wicked delight.

I have quite a different background from a lot of people in the Labour party - I'm of mixed heritage.

A lot of people decide, if you're mixed, you're black. And so they try to force you to choose a culture.

As much as I'd love to believe that we are 'post-racial' - an idea that really gained traction after the election of Barack Obama in 2008 - I can never escape the fact that in the world I am perceived as a 'black man' and, in certain parts of the world, as a 'black gay man.'

Obama a ‘light-skinned’ African-American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.

I was raised in a completely black world. In those days, if a white woman married a black man, she lived as a black woman, and that was just the end of it. So, I don't have a feeling of being bi-racial. I don't have a connection to it. People often come up to me thinking I do have a connection to it, and I kind of let them down because I really don't.

Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.

In black America there's such a thing as passing, the black people who are light skinned and they will pass for white.

My mother always told me to embrace both sides of my background. And she also taught me one very useful thing when I was going to first grade. She said, "You're Bahamian and African-American on one side, and Russian-Jewish on the other. You're no more one than the other, and it's beautiful that you have all this. It makes your life all the more rich. But society will see you only as black."

I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept. I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.

We are not Black Muslims we are Muslims. You see, you have Catholics. You have Chinese Catholics, you have Indian Catholics, you have black Catholics and white Catholics. But I'm sure you don't ask a man are you a white Catholic? Are you a Chinese are you a yellow Catholic, a red Catholic, or a white Catholic? He's just a Catholic. We have black Muslims, we have brown Muslims, we have red Muslims, we have yellow Muslims, we have even white complected Muslims, so I'd like to clear that point, this is a press word, Black Muslims.

Most American Hispanics don't belong to one race, either. I keep telling kids that, when filling out forms, they should put "yes" to everything - yes, I am Chinese; yes, I am African; yes, I am white; yes, I am a Pacific Islander; yes, yes, yes - just to befuddle the bureaucrats who think we live separately from one another.

America is the only country in the world that classifies as Negro any person who has one drop of African blood in his or her veins.

He [Barack Obama] was light-skinned with no Negro dialect.

They say African Americans. I say black people. I've only been to Africa once. I've been in America all my life!