Racial Experience Quotes

My mother is an African-American from the South Side of Chicago who married a white guy in 1978. She was hyperaware of racism and made me aware of that.

What whites cannot experience and may never understand is that no matter which side of the bed I chose to wake up on, I would still be a black man in the racially divisive America.

There is, for me, as a black woman, as an African woman, a sense of possibility in America that I don't feel when I'm in Europe.

I don't think Luke Cage as a superhero is something that has changed dramatically from the '70s to now. He's a black man going through the same thing as other people of colour - it's just that he has superpowers.

Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.

In [Ralph] Ellison's case, it's more psychological than it is phenomenal, and it's conditioned by anger, animosity, and lack of desire to engage with the black body. There was always simultaneity that had nothing to do with visuality. You can be there and not be there at the same time and be fully visible all the time. That's what really struck me about Ellison .

What I think is really great about this movie [42], that young people who weren't there will have a chance to have the visceral experience of what Jackie Robinson went through.

I don't think being black has held me back at all. Being black makes you strong.

The ideas of right and wrong change with the experience of the race, and this change is wrought by the gradual ascertaining of consequences - of results.

I am a black woman, and of course, that's who I'm going to be playing, but I'm also biracial, and that's a different side of the experience.

After all the black man has been through in this world, he can still often reach levels of spirituality the most pampered white man cannot touch. Maybe what he's been through is the reason why.

Every time we had a hot war going on in Asia, it was difficult for Asian Americans here.

The great joy of doing 'The Daily Show' for me is that I get to sit on the fence between cultures. I am commenting on the absurdity of both sides as an outsider and insider. Sometimes I'm playing the brown guy, and sometimes I'm not, but the best stuff I do always goes back to being a brown kid in a white world.

I think that [Eddie Murphy's famous "White Like Me"] is probably the first time I thought, "Oh. Being black is different. That is a totally different experience."

I come from a family of Mississippi sharecroppers just a few generations away from slavery, and I experienced a lot of racism growing up - you can't avoid that if you're a person of color in this country.

There's always opposition when you speak on topics like I'm speaking on. But I'm a black man in America. I grew up black in America. You can't tell me that what I've experienced and what I've seen is not true.

I don't think I'm really so unique. If every black person looked at their life they would quickly discover that they have been influenced by every type of music prevalent in America.

Some useful advice for all of my Asian-American brothers and sisters - never go paint-balling with a Vietnam veteran.

I was the only white kid in my neighborhood for most of my youth even in high school, so reverse racism was just as apparent as racism.

To make your life a work of art, you must have the material to work with. The race, any race, is just such an experience.

I grew up in an area of Ireland where there weren't many black or mixed-race children. But I never had any hassle; maybe I've blocked it out, but I don't think so.

Latinos come from different countries, and they tend to segregate with only their country instead of embracing all the other countries, because in reality, all the Latinos are going through the same experiences of discrimination and racism.

There are obstacles and challenges that my dark-skinned sisters face that I will never know. How they are perceived when they walk in a room of strangers is something I will never truly know.

People sometimes ask me if I would not give anything to be white, I answer, in the words of the song, most emphatically, 'No.' How do I know what I might be if I were a white man? I might be a sand-hog, burrowing away and losing my health for $8 a day. I might be a street-car conductor at $12 or $15 a week. There is many a white man less fortunate and less well equipped than I am. In fact, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient - in America.

I write because I am a Black woman, listening attentively to her people.