Ana Castillo Quotes

I think that, as a black girl, you grow up internalizing all these messages that say you shouldn't accept your hair or your skin tone or your natural features or that you shouldn't have a voice or that you aren't smart.

In grammar school some of the girls had problems with me. My face was too light. My hair was too long. It was the black-consciousness period, and I felt really bad.

Out of the race must come its own thinkers and writers. Authors belonging to the white race have written good books, for which I am deeply grateful, but it seems to be almost impossible for a white man to put himself completely in our place. No man can feel the iron which enters another man's soul.

There's a lot of ways that white women undermine women of color, and black women in particular.

At one point, I bought brown contacts because people told me I wasn't Latin enough to play Latin, and I'm Puerto Rican. I went and bought brown contacts just so I could go in and look more Latino... but that was something that I've dealt with in this business.

That something that I fought so hard for throughout the beginning of my career is I didn't want to pancake my skin a lighter color to fit into the... ballet. I wanted to be myself. I didn't want to have to wear makeup that made my nose look thinner.

If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic, too, as we would learn.

I was a mixed black girl existing in a westernized Hawaiian culture where petite Asian women were the ideal, in a white culture where black women were furthest from the standard of beauty, in an American culture where trans women of color were invisible.

Being born, especially being born a person of color, is a political act in itself.

Hollywood hasn't changed. It is the most racist, anti-Indian institution in the world.

I am Ecuadorian but people felt so safe passing me off as a skinny, blue-eyed white girl.

White people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet.

It was rough being dark. I got heat from my own people more than anyone else. I remember going to my mom and saying, 'Why am I so black?' And she said, 'Because I'm black. You just gotta always work harder than the average bear.'

How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.

It takes time for brown people and people of different ethnicities to get into the Hollywood world, which is predominantly Caucasian and African American.

I went to a predominantly white school, and I was the only black girl. I can remember thinking, 'I don't want to be as dark as I am - I want to be a little fairer.' I didn't want to be me.

This form is only an application for a marriage license and yet it asks for my color. I looked at my arm and wrote “pink”, Your assistant then said that I have to pick from White, Brown, Black, Yellow or Red. The form says I answer under penalty of perjury, so I want to tell the truth, but the city of New York must explain to me how I tell what color I am. I am a trained artist and I can assure you that my skin color is not a white. My ancestors came from Germany and the yellow Mongols and Huns raped and pillaged there, not to mention the blacks from North Africa. So what is the test a citizen should use to determine color if not pigment?

Barack Obama is an educated fool. He is viewed as the white man in blackface in the community.

Why is the world that I see around me mixed, and why is the world I see in movies filled with all white people? Why does it have to be like that?

If you're in a business where Latinos only play Indian maidens and what I call 'Conchita Lolita' parts - the little fiery spitfires - you do what you have to do.

I know that some people, when they are growing up and they - as a person of color in a majority community - that they may feel as if they are left out, or they feel a bit strange.

I was always told that I acted too white. I was always told that I was going to date a white guy - which, in fairness, was true: I do have a white boyfriend. So they weren't entirely wrong, but all of those things were really damaging.

As a woman, as a Jew, as a lesbian, as a labor leader in a time of great anti-union animus, I know that other people project their biases on me. But it is nothing like the experience of our African-American brothers and sisters, especially black and brown men and boys.

I've been told that I wasn't Latino enough, which was code for 'street' enough.

Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde.