Angie Thomas Quotes

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

From a young age, I was rubbing elbows with a very different kind of person and social class, and I felt a lot of tension and conflict in my identity because of that.

Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters.

And I am interested in the fact that class is very much a factor in America, even though it's not supposed to be.

Like his white brother in the U. S. A., the American Negro is a proletarian by compulsion and not by choice. He regards the bourgeoisie with adulation rather than antagonism and, like most other Americans, cannot see "culture" except in white tie and tails. His consuming ambition is to become a bourgeois himself, and in this he is a carbon copy of his white fellow American.

I didn't have that many black people in my life, so I had to sort of search them out. And I didn't grow up in America, but I identified as much with their writing about the black experience as I did with their writing about the human experience.

If you're a black person in America, it's really hard to avoid being black. And what I mean is that the reality of your cultural history, regardless of whether or not you talk about it, it's there.

'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'

I used to be obsessed with race. I'm more obsessed with class now.

Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes: the mucky-mucks and the folk.

I think white women need to wake up and say, 'Not all women are white,' three times in front of the mirror.

I was an anomaly because my father was a Harvard man, and he came from a family of poor people.

In the locker room, and when I'm with my friends, we use racial slurs... What I do with my black friends is not up to white America to dictate to me what's appropriate and inappropriate.

I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote 'smart' kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.

I think it's really progressive to talk about race in relationships. I think there is so much room for that, and there needs to be more of it.

Race affects everything that I do, and everything that I create speaks to intersectionality.

I have had the opportunity to become acquainted with many wonderful people from many walks of life. I have known rich and poor, famous and modest, wise and otherwise.

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

We don't like talking about race in the U.K. - it's a very sensitive subject. People get extremely defensive and run for the covers, but I believe we have to talk about it.

I grew up in poverty on the edge of a golf course. I saw how people lived on the other side of the tracks, the upper crust and the WASPs at the country club. We had chickens and pigs in our yards. We butchered every year. I'll never forget those things.

I honestly realized that my dad was white when someone told me in middle school. They're like, 'Oh your dad's white?' I'm like, 'Oh, my gosh, he really is white.' I knew what race was, but it didn't matter to me.

There are few things more American than falling back on the language of race when what we're really talking about is class or, more accurate still, manners, values and taste.

A lot of times, when you don't have to deal with some of the circumstances that affect minority culture, you just don't think they exist. This is a conversation I have with lots of my white friends all the time.

College was where I got to actually experience the difference between black and white.

I am not going to say that only people of color can write people of color, because that means only white people can write white people, and that's not OK.