Racial Construct Quotes

I think 'Mudbound' reveals the interconnectiveness of our stories. You can't separate out threads of history and race as economic construct. 'Mudbound' makes it very plain. Race is about commerce; it's not an actual thing. It's a fiction that was created to basically divide resources unequally.

Races are very often invented from ignorance, or for evil purposes.

White people have basically been encouraged for most of recent history in America to think of themselves as outside of race. White people do have race. They need to understand how their race has been constructed as artificially as everybody else's.

Sometimes it is claimed by those who argue that race is just a social construct that the human genome project shows that because people share roughly 99% of their genes in common, that there are no races. This is silly.

We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didn't walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.

I am not renouncing my blackness and going on about my day. I am rejecting the legitimacy of the entire racial construct in which blackness functions as one orienting pole.

I think that unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn't real, race isn't real.

I write a lot about race precisely because I don't believe it's real.

If people feel misled or deceived, then sorry that they feel that way, but I believe that's more due to their definition and construct of race in their own minds than it is to my integrity or honesty, because I wouldn't say I'm African American, but I would say I'm black, and there's a difference in those terms.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

The American paradigm of race requires that there be an ‘other’ - and the other is Black people. That's what makes white people, white.

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.