Jonathan Coleman Quotes

Many people are afraid to talk about race because it's so emotionally loaded. We don't have the vocabulary to talk about it. Every day, our vocabulary seems more and more inadequate.

I do wish that people talked about the subject of race, especially in the South.

We don't discuss race, so just the discussion of race has become racist. We've been trained that it's such a lightning rod that we don't even want to say the word.

Now, race is one of those topics in America that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable. You bring it up at a dinner party or in a workplace environment, it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail.

I did a paper on why is race so uncomfortable to discuss. Is it because you don't want to bring up bad history in America? You want to be conscious of whatever you say about that because it's a serious point.

Everyone is so terrified of being labeled a racist.

'Crash' is a movie about the racial tension that still exists in America. A lot of us pretend that we don't have preconceived notions and stereotypical ideals about each other, but we do. And we wanted to create a movie about people whose lives crash into each others' accidentally.

I found there's a fairly blatant racism in America that's already there, and I don't think I noticed it when I lived here as a kid. But when I went back to South Africa, and then it's sort of thrust in your face, and then came back here - I just see it everywhere.

If acknowledging that racial misgivings and misunderstandings are still a part of politics and life in America, I plead guilty.

To the great majority of white Americans, the Negro problem has distinctly negative connotations. It suggests something difficult to settle and equally difficult to leave alone. It is embarrassing. It makes for moral uneasiness.

Many of the racial problems in America are caused by the fact that people are innately tribal, and politicians know how to exploit that biological fact.

I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.

People feel uncomfortable talking about racial issues out of fear that if they express things, they will be characterized in a way that's not fair. I think that there is still a need for a dialogue about things racial that we've not engaged in.

I was never exposed to a great deal of racism, but the Chicago I grew up in was very, very segregated.

The NAACP believes the Tea Party is racist. The Tea Party believes the NAACP is racist.

In spite of what some people claim, we are not in a post-racial era. I think it's still an important issue to bring up.

Only blacks can play the race card, apparently; only they think in racial terms, at least to hear white America tell it.

The misperception about the South is that everybody is racist, and all black people are victims, that what was prevalent in the '60s is only relegated to the South.

It was definitely during the Obama administration that talking about racism, or calling it out, suddenly seemed taboo. It seemed like talking about race was somehow summoning the evil of racism.

We live in a world where racism hasn't changed at all. It's that old thing of, you know, the more things change, the more things remain the same.

America still has a race problem, though not the one that conventional wisdom would suggest: the racism of whites toward blacks. Old fashioned white racism has lost its legitimacy in the world and become an almost universal disgrace.

College was where I got to actually experience the difference between black and white.

People feel really uncomfortable talking about race and identity, largely because the subject is so taboo.

The fans called me Jungleman. They said this young guy's not white. He's black in a white man's skin.

Race is the San Andreas Fault of our culture as well as our history. Its fissures are forever present and not that far beneath the surface of every day life. To deny that is to risk being labeled delusional.