Mahershala Ali Quotes

There's this perception that there's a pipeline problem for women and people of color. I don't buy into that. I think we have a broken doorbell problem, and there are plenty of women and people of color standing at the doorstep trying to get in the door, and nobody's opening it.

I didn't see myself any different from my white counterparts in school. I just didn't! I thought I could do what they did. And what I didn't do well, I thought people were going to give me the opportunity to do well, because maybe they saw my talent, so they would give me a chance. I had no idea that they would see me completely different.

In such a colony, the highest capacities of mind and heart, which, as every unprejudiced observer will confess, can readily be discovered in a large number of individuals of our nation, would be sooner and more rapidly developed than our present social life admits of, where so many circumstances unite to stifle the most splendid, most promising natural abilities in the bud.

Unfortunately, oftentimes people hire and give opportunities to people that look like them. They don't realize how much their own internal lives or privilege gets in the way of looking for people outside of the traditional spaces where they always find people.

As a black actor, you always have the feeling that there's not as much work out there as for a white counterpart, but is America after all; you have to play ball if you're going to play ball.

The greatest problem is not with flat-out white racists, but rather with the far larger number of Americans who believe intellectually in racial equality but are quietly oblivious to injustice around them.

Because people of color will definitely, definitely become the power base in the Western Hemisphere.

But even race-neutral policies and recruitment efforts designed to achieve greater diversity are, in the end, not race neutral.

We've heard the excuses from those responsible for hiring that they don't want to take a chance on a new director. But the truth is that the industry hires new directors all the time; it's just that most of them are white males.

In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear. Through initiatives like My Brother's Keeper, I'm personally committed to changing both perception and reality.

Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.

You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.

As a senior at Princeton, I felt like the whole world was open to me. In our country, that's not a given. We aspire to be a place of equal opportunity, and yet where you're born determines your prospects.

I still think in this country, and this might surprise you, the one thing that George Bush said as president that I do agree with, I love that phrase, 'the soft bigotry of low expectations.'

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America

A full commitment to integration means taking all reasonable steps to dismantle these barriers, even if this necessitates reforming long established practices that were not imposed with the intent to disadvantage the racial minorities but do so nonetheless.

The time has gone by for colored people to talk of patriotism: ... He used to be proud that his grandfather … fought for liberty in the Revolutionary War. But that time had passed by.

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

For black people the war [WWII] provided an opportunity to accelerate their demands for equality…. Black Americans highlighted the distance between this ideal of America and the reality of ongoing racial inequality, often through the black press and civil rights organizations

In fact, for blacks who have education and who have not succumbed to a new lifestyle—the grievances, and the coarseness represented by rap music—it’s gotten tremendously better. What’s disheartening, though, is that when you study ethnic groups around the world, the ones that are lagging behind are those where their leaders always tell the same story: that it’s other people holding you back, and that therefore you need to stand against those other people and resist their culture. But that culture may be the key to success.

I think it's worth putting energy into affirmative action in terms of having diversity in positions of power because the door was shut for so long.

All the poor white people, all the poor black people, all the Hispanics, they're in the same boat. They've got no economic opportunities.

You can't be perceived as 'the black actress who doesn't get the same kind of roles as the white actress.' You gotta run the same race. You gotta give the same quality of performances. You gotta have the same standard of excellence, even though people know that you're coming to the race in a deficit. That's just what life is about.

Although I was born into the America that experiences and believes in opportunity, my trips to Ferguson, Detroit, Atlanta, and Chicago have revealed that there is an undercurrent of unease.