Roxane Gay Quotes

I started a lecture series that was inspired by my reporting on race in America. The 'Black in America' series launched on CNN in 2007 as an opportunity to freshen the national conversation on race.

Race in America is not a problem you can go over, or around or under. You've got to go through it.

As important as the presidency is, that's not the only thing to take a look at in determining the racial health of the United States.

Race is still real and you got to recognize it.

I still think that we have a hesitance to talk about things racial. And I think we do it at our detriment. We go from incident to incident, and we have spikes in which race becomes something that we talk about, as opposed to talking about race in those less contentious times when I think we might make more progress.

To believe that the United States is post-racial requires an almost incomprehensible inability or unwillingness to stare truth in the face.

I think race in America is a huge one. That's something that needs to be confronted, certainly.

We need to have a more thoughtful, two-sided conversation about racial issues in this country.

I know that so many of us hoped that, by electing our first black president, we had turned the page on this chapter in our history. But, despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America's long struggle with race is far from finished.

Race remains a significant challenge in America.

Despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America's long struggle with race is far from finished.

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

The only reason race matters is because of racism.

I'm a grandmother and like every grandmother, I worry about the safety and security of my grandchildren, but my worries are not the same as black grandmothers.

I think racial justice - and addressing the sick and enduring legacy of structural racism - remains one of the greatest challenges of our time, and one that's particularly important for more and more white people to speak up about.

The myth of integration as propounded under the banner of the liberal ideology must be cracked because it makes people believe that something is being achieved when in reality the artificially integrated circles are a soporfic to the blacks while salving the consciences of the few guilt-stricken whites.

I think there's a racial outcome to a lot of what goes in America, but I don't think race is always the reason.

When Obama came to power, there was a lot of talk about a post-racial America.

Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.

This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.

In spite of what some people claim, we are not in a post-racial era. I think it's still an important issue to bring up.

If you want to know if racism is a problem in your country, you might not want to ask white people.

It's hard to say when or if we will actually arrive at that place called 'post-racial', or, better yet, post-racism.

I don't think that the country is ever ready to have the conversation about race.

The issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect.