Rachel Dolezal Quotes

I don't know how to write without thinking what people would want. You don't know whether they want you to be black or white, so you kind of get a gray, something in the middle.

Self-censorship has become a part of me. I think because we live in a place where community is very important, family is very important, you feel the weight of how people look at you. Even though I might seem very modern and very liberated, I still have a lot of issues to deal with. I'm scared of how people look at me.

I was very pushed to look a certain way and act a certain way, and it wasn't me, but I played by their rules to get my foot in the door.

When I grew up, you needed to have straight hair. It's symbolic of needing to be like everyone else, needing to look like everyone else. And what that meant was looking like the dominant ruling class in America.

I went to high school in Frisco, Texas, where a lot of people look the same, dress the same, act the same. People are either like, 'You're not black enough for this' or 'You're not white enough for this.'

In reality, I was drowning in negativity. I was stuck playing a part, too afraid to change, too afraid of losing my readers if I suddenly stopped being so mean.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.

Middle and high school is a time of people telling you who you are before you know who you are. I was in advanced classes at Frick and Schenley, and people would say I was trying to be white because of the way I spoke. Or they'd say I was gay.

I think that there were only two people in my high school that were comfortable there, and I think they are both pumping gas now.

The cardinal rule for any performer is that they should know themselves before they enter the spotlight, and I didn't. I was just Neil and I did what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to get married, so I got married. I was supposed to get a job, so I looked for work.

It's the misfortune of German authors that not a single one of them dares to expose his true character. Everyone thinks that he has to be better than he is.

I feel like sometimes that I was not meant for this society.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

I am begining to look more and more like my miserable imitators.

I've never seen anyone more messed up over success than Richard Pryor. For him, it's a constant battle between success in the white world and keeping it real for his black self.

There was a time in the '90s where, as an African-American man, you had to be a misogynistic R&B star or a rapper, and I didn't fit into either one of those. I was advised by my label to remain closeted at that time.

It was an ongoing struggle to say no, I don't want to be a part of the perpetuation of this stereotype.

A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.

It is hard for a black man to just be himself. We spend so much time in defense of something that is indefensible because there is nothing to defend.

Society has taught us to suppress certain things and not do certain things.

Growing up, I was a target. Speaking the right way, standing the right way, holding your wrist the right way. Every day was a test, and there were a thousand ways to fail, a thousand ways to betray yourself, to not live up to someone else's standards of what was accepted, of what was normal.

Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.

I didn't know who the hell I was. I was whoever they wanted me to be.

White domination is so complete that even American Indian children want to be cowboys. It's as if Jewish children wanted to play Nazis.