Nicole Miller Quotes

This self imposed guilt about racial and ethnic profiling is idiocy.

Profiling is a means for telling whom you have to worry about.

People are quick to pigeonhole you.

I am followed in department stores. I have walked in dressed professionally or dressed in jeans, and I have walked into stores, and instantly, security is on my back.

People love to put human beings or actors in boxes.

You don't pigeonhole yourself, people pigeonhole you. If the world is not at a place yet where it can just be like, "This music is gay and it's music," then it's not my fault that it gets pigeonholed, it's not the people in the band's fault, it's because people won't just let music be music, people who need to put a name on something or to critique something.

The enemy has always been able to point the finger of suspicion and/or guilt to Black leaders that they are enriching themselves at the expense of the people.

Didn't need the user icon to know you're white and male.

I've spent a lot of time working on declassified documents - and they do get declassified after decades - you look at the record of declassified documents, and they are mostly concerned with keeping what the government does secret from its own population. It's mostly defense of the power system from its own population. Very little is authentic security.

Labels applied to people of any race are inherently offensive.

Did they practice looking suspicious in mirrors? Welcome to the United States. Don’t even think about chewing gum the wrong way.’ (Carlos)

These days I find myself wanting to avoid being pigeon-holed, ghettoized, held in a different category than other authors. And when people ask me if I'm a black writer, or just a writer who happens to be black, I tend to say that it's either a dumb question or a question which happens to be dumb.

Critics like to describe and categorize things, and categories often have a way of limiting people.

I meet people and a lot of times, instead of saying, "Are you from the East Coast?" people just go, "you're from the East Coast, right?", having no reason to have known that. I don't know what that is. Maybe it's just that I'm Jewish.

The weird thing is, in America, people were saying, "You're not going to get recognized because all you're going to see is basically your forehead and eyes."

Labels are for cans, not for people.

When I moved to London in the 1990s, it had changed a great deal. Racism had become deeply uncool. But there has been a return of racism in the guise of "antiterrorism." People who look like myself are immediately suspect. I've become extremely self-conscious about going into crowded public places.

I hate it when people blame someone else and don't take responsibility.

I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.

Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.

Piscary killed people, but he didn’t have the concept of pity or remorse. It would be like telling a shark he was a bad fish and to stop eating people. But Trent? He knew he was doing wrong, and he did it anyway.

I've had people who see all my characters as Native, even if they aren't. It's kind of like assuming all a writer's characters are really female because the writer is a woman. I've learned to let that go.

One thing I do know, you can't change hatred by showing those people that they're wrong about us.

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.

A lot of people are now criticizing Attorney General John Ashcroft for his policy on detaining what he considers suspicious people. I think he's going a little overboard. Today, he arrested the entire band Foreigner.