Racial Assumptions Quotes

In the United States, if you're African-American, it can be assumed that your family has been here for generations. In Europe, colonialism is much more alive, and it's assumed you're from Nigeria or Senegal.

Whenever someone refers to me as someone "who happens to be black," I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.

It is one of the peculiar phases of Anglo-Saxon conceit to refuse to believe that every black man does not want to be white.

Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets, you usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.

I love Obama because he is proof all black people don't look alike. Nobody every told me, 'Good morning, Mr. President.' We don't all look alike.

Africans took a lot of pride in the election of Obama, because it proved wrong those who believe in racist assumptions, that a black man could not live up to a white man.

It's really interesting when I go into a community where they haven't seen me before because I often get, 'I didn't know you were black.'

I like lowriders and music from the '50s and '60s. A lot of people assumed I was Mexican.

Readers need to stop assuming characters are white if race isn't explicitly defined.

To be white in America is to assume, with total self-confidence and little afterthought, the personal ownership of public spaces.

Now, I don't see color. People tell me I'm white and I believe them because police officers call me 'sir'.

There are so many people who have this idea of who I am because I'm black.

A lot of people don't know that my father is black.

I say it in the writers' room all the time: My black is not your black. What's terrifying is that, just the same way we've all accepted that normal is white, everybody seems to buy into the idea that there's only one way to be black or one way to be Hispanic. That's as damaging as anything else.

People often expect that I should know a lot of things because I'm black. I don't really explain it to people, but it's like, I'm from Australia, my Mum's Aussie, and I grew up with five other Aussie brothers and sisters.

When I first started working on 'The Wood,' these people couldn't grasp the concept that, one, there is a black middle class, and, two, Inglewood is a part of it.

I actually thought when I met Tina, my former wife, that she was White. Later I found out that she wasn't, and she was actually very much in-tune with her Blackness.

I hate to get on the racial thing because that's something I've always been totally against. But the problem with the media is that they think that the word rock means white and the word rap means black.

Just because I'm Native American doesn't mean I can track furniture through the wilderness." She deepened her voice: "'Yes, kemosabe. A three-legged table passed this way an hour ago.' Heck, I don’t know.

The white audiences thought I was white, my features being what they are, and at every performance I'd have to take off my gloves to prove I was a spade.

I hate that when people are like, "Well, all dwarves know each other, right?" And you want to get mad, but you can't because we do.

I'm half Asian, so people immediately go, "Oh, you do kung fu," like that's what we do. We wake up, we do kung fu, we brush our teeth. It's just assumed that you're not working your ass off to make this believable and make this something great, and we absolutely are.

In elite, primarily white institutions, there are many blacks who have white wives. So much so that sometimes there is almost the assumption that I would be married to a white woman.

The idea that the Hispanic vote hinges on one issue - immigration - is the most ridiculous and patronizing notion.

I have blonde hair and blue eyes, and whenever I tell people I'm Greek, they don't believe me.