Lexi Underwood Quotes

The worst moment in my life was when I was seven years old and I discovered that there was a thing such as racism. You don't know you're different until someone lets you know.

I can be standing in Barneys with my coat and purse and my selections, and some white woman will say, 'Can you get this in my size?' What she sees is a black woman, and her service button goes off.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It's a narrative I never imagined for them.

I remember the first time that I realized that being black meant that I wasn't allowed certain things. It was in the fourth grade, and it was who I thought was my best friend not inviting me to his birthday party because I would be the only black kid there. It was the first time I ever felt restricted, and it certainly wasn't the last time.

One thing that really bothers me is when a young black person speaks or leads a conversation, and afterward a white person says, 'You're really articulate.'

The most effective adaptation of racism over time is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people.

I have been regularly confronted with racism, very regularly, and since my earliest childhood.

Implicit bias - our subconscious associations of race - permeates everything that we do. And we must pursue systemic accountability to fix it.

Racism is like high blood pressure—the person who has it doesn’t know he has it until he drops over with a God damned stroke. There are no symptoms of racism. The victim of racism is in a much better position to tell you whether or not you’re a racist than you are.

I also acknowledge that prejudice runs very deep in our society. And, in the real world, discrimination rears its ugly head in the shadows, where it's very difficult to root it out.

Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.

As a black man, sometimes you can't tell if what you're seeing has underlying bigotry, or it's a normal conversation and you're being paranoid. That dynamic in itself is unsettling. I admit sometimes I see race and racism when its not there.

In aversive racism, the concept of racism is abhorrent to that person. But they're filled with racist conditioning and bias, as we all are. Because that conflicts with their identity as good people, they suppress it and are even more in denial about it. They are even more likely to erupt in defensiveness if it gets called out.

Some of the most destructive forms of racism - like being denied a home loan or being passed on for a job where you are the most qualified candidate - are hard to measure in real time.

We all have our prejudices, and we may or may not be aware of them. Sometimes people walk by me and give me a wider berth. It happens. I wear hoodies all the time because my head gets cold. Something innocuous can be misunderstood.

I'm about looking at each of those perceived menacing black men that you see in the streets all over the place, people that you oftentimes will walk past without assuming that they have the same humanity, fears that we all do.

There was so much racism when I was a kid, but it was also ignorant.

The most anyone could reasonably say about institutional racism is that the 'evidence is far from conclusive.

No one is ever bias-free, but some people let their biases influence their actions more than others.

I grew up in Welwyn Garden City, and when you're a woman of colour in a predominantly white area, you become aware of prejudice from a young age.

In the mainstream, I'm suspect because I'm black. I have dreadlocks, I have a goatee. I mean, I'm just suspect. In my classroom and at Columbia, I'm not as suspect because it's clear I know what I'm doing, but I am still suspect.

When a black man is stopped by a cop for no apparent reason, that is covert racism. When a black woman shops in a fancy store and is followed by security guards, that is covert racism. It is more subtle than 1960s racism, but it is still racism.

We're raised to believe that black men have to be one specific way.

The first time I didn't get called back at an audition, I cried. My mom told me, 'We're doing this for fun, and if it's not fun anymore, we're not going to do it. So if you ever cry again, we're going to stop.' I never cried from then on, and I kept that lesson for the rest of my life.