James McBride Quotes

I'm Jewish, so it's like I'm not totally white. I'm, like, gray.

I wish I'd been a mixed infant.

My father is black and my mother is white. Therefore, I could answer to either, which kind of makes me a racial Lone Ranger, caught between two communities.

I feel like I come from a smaller off shoot of black people because I am mixed. People say I'm African American but that doesn't include the other half of me.

When you're biracial, you can feel like you're fully neither, not fully both. But I won't strip away my heritage for anyone's comfort.

To describe something as being black and white means it is clearly defined. Yet when your ethnicity is black and white, the dichotomy is not that clear. In fact, it creates a grey area.

The idea that a person can be both black and white - and at the same time neither - is novel in America.

I'm a white girl and not a white girl, identified by other people as black and not black for as long as I can remember - which, in mixed-people speak, means biracial.

I'm Japanese, and I'm also white American, and neither camp wants me in their camp.

Regarding the idea of race, .. no agreement seems to exist about what race means. Race seems to embody a fact as simple and as obvious as the noonday sun, but if that is so, why the endless wrangling about the idea and the facts of race. What is a race? How can it be recognized? Who constitute the several races?.

I do not believe in race as such. Race is a fraud. All modern people are the conglomeration of so many ethnic mixtures that no pure race remains.

I am half Puerto Rican, a quarter German and a quarter black. That was always a big issue for me - being mixed race - because casting directors tended to be very like, 'OK, are you Hispanic for this role?' 'Or is she going to be African American?'

I'm a suspicious mulatto, which means I'm too black to be white and too white to be doing it right.

When people first meet me, they're always like, 'What are you?' as far as ethnicity. And I've been pegged as 'ethnically ambiguous.'

To make an absolutely gross generalization, I think a lot of people feel like if you're mixed, more often than not you're quote unquote white. So if you're mixed, you embrace the mainstream culture more than the African-American culture.

I am Charles Mingus. Half-black man. Yellow man. Half-yellow. Not even yellow, nor white enough to pass for nothing but black and not too light enough to be called white.

I am the daughter of a Chicana and anglo. I think most days I am an embarrassment to both groups. I sometimes hate the white in me so viciously that I long to forget the commitment my skin has imposed upon my life.

My theory is because I'm Asian and white I sort of look like the future. I'm the melting pot.

White people must know that they are part black; Black people must know that they are part white.

Probably 95 percent of ‘white’ Americans have some ‘Negroid blood.’

The genius of Rachel Dolezal's transracial achievement is that it has nearly limitless applications. Rachel is taking 'the power of positive thinking' to a whole new level.

To this day it is all but impossible for me to actually stop and think of my parents as white and black or to think of myself, therefore, as half and half.

I'm not white, I'm not black.

The Census Bureau is thinking of creating a new category because so many kids don't know how to describe themselves using the existing categories. I call these kids the "Keanu Reeves Generation," after the actor who has a Hawaiian father and a Welsh mother.

I'm African-American by my culture, not by my color. Race does not exist.