Racial Dialogue Quotes

As long as you say I'm the guy who's real about it, I have no problem being the person who people look to to talk about race.

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.

Finally I got to the point where I said, I'd like to start a project where we can actually talk about race and poverty, not through the lens of a particular case, but much more broadly.

And what happens a lot of times when - let's just speak specifically white and black - when white or black people feel misunderstood when it comes to talking about race, they immediately get defensive.

I'm most biased about how white people have to learn to shut up when the conversation of racism comes up. White people have to learn to listen. Whether they agree with what they're hearing or not, they have to know to shut up and listen.

I think that having a black president in America has been a seismic shift, in terms of what has been going on racially in America. I think that America is now engaging with how we have come to this point.

White society will not listen to preaching. They will not listen to their liberals. Liberalism has not grown within white society, and we blacks cannot stand idly by watching the situation. We can only generate a response from white society when we, as blacks, speak with a black voice and say what we want. Now has come the time when we, as blacks, must articulate what we want, and put it across to the white man, and from a position of strength.

The racial conversation in the States is so multifaceted and multilayered. Obviously it's not always a positive conversation, but it's just so much more detailed than it was when I was growing up in South Africa.

I can't think of the last Asian that I ran into that talked about internment camps. But black people always want to talk to me about slavery.

I hope [white brothers and sisters] read this book [Tears we cannot stop] and engage with it, but other white people have a better chance of speaking more directly to the white folk they know, because they're less likely to be subject to ridicule. They're insiders, so to speak.

White fragility! White people are so sensitive about race and racial conversations. I feel like I'm always walking on eggshells when I'm around white people.

People feel uncomfortable talking about racial issues out of fear that if they express things, they will be characterized in a way that's not fair. I think that there is still a need for a dialogue about things racial that we've not engaged in.

In America right now, the people who talk about race the most are people of color - and if we are going to move the needle forward, it's WHITE people who need to acknowledge their role in racism.

It's very important for me to have dialogues across racial lines.

I wanted to open the dialogue about race in ballet and bring more people in. It's just beautiful to see the interest that has exploded for such an incredible art form that I will forever be grateful to!

When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.

The thing about '48 Hrs.' that really isn't thought about much is that's the first film where the black and the white criticize each other.

Part of the desire to live in a post-racial world includes the desire not to have to talk about racism, which includes a false perception that if you are talking about race, then you're perpetuating the notion of race. I reject that.

We have avoided in recent years talking openly and honestly about race out of fear that it will alienate and polarize. In my own view, it’s our refusal to deal openly and honestly with race that leads us to keep repeating these cycles of exclusion and division, and rebirthing a caste-like system that we claim we’ve left behind

It's very uncomfortable to talk about race. It often devolves before it begins.

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.

Until the white man in America sits down and talks with The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, he won't even know what the race problem - what makes the race problem what it is.

I do think that people will claim a certain fatigue about talking about race. But I think that even though they do, it's still necessary - completely necessary.

If you don't address race, then people are like, 'Why don't you talk about the elephant in the room?' But you have to do it right. It can't be gimmicky.

Just like Pharaoh couldn't get a solution to his problem until he talked to Moses, or Nebuchadnezzar or Belshazzar couldn't get a solution to his problem until he talked to Daniel, the white man in America today will never understand the race problem or come anywhere near getting a solution to the race problem until he talks to The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.