Racial Visibility Quotes

Some of white middle America haven't seen a black gay guy in a music video before.

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 .

Indians are the second largest population in the world, but we're invisible on TV - everything is either black or white.

There were no small brown kids as the centre of the children's fiction I grew up with.

When I was growing up, Asians were so few and far between as to be almost invisible. And so the idea of an Asian American movement or an Asian American thrust in this country was unthinkable.

When blacks become humanly visible, when their true beliefs are known, their mask shatters and their symbiotic bond with whites is broken.

Sometimes, we want Asians in the media, but we don't want them to talk about being Asian. For me, that's interesting because I'm from Asia. If you want me to be on television but I can't be Asian, I'm not being true to myself.

When you're the only Asian in the room, the last thing you want to do is to point out you're Asian. And be the Asian dude.

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again." How It Feels to Be Colored Me

I think that society is aspiring towards racial indifference, but the reality of life is not that. And so when you meet someone, you can see their race - it's right there on their face - and I feel like it's interesting.

I get so tickled when that pilot happens to be an African American because I rarely see that. The same is true when I go to find restaurants. I mean, most places I go, I kind of have some idea who the chef is, which is why I want to go.

I'm a very political person. I'm a very opinionated person. I have a lot of opinions about LGBTQ representations in the media, and it's not just a gay community issue. It's a black issue. It's an Asian issue. It's a minority issue in general.

I don't wanna be labeled as straight or labeled as gay. I just want people to look at me and see me as white.

I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting with black bodies in it on a museum wall... It strengthened me on a cellular level.

There aren't many Asian players in Europe or the Premier League, so that's more attention for me.

I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.

The condition of visibility as it relates to black people was crucial. Connected to that, I've always been interested in science fiction and horror films and was acutely aware of the political and social implications of Ralph Ellison's description of invisibility as it relates to black people, as opposed to the kind of retinal invisibility that H.G. Wells described in his novel Invisible Man.

It's important to me for the world to see black men in different capacities - capacities in which they're probably not used to seeing them.