If you know the history of the whole concept of whiteness if you know the history of the whole concept of the white race, where it came from and for what reason you know that it was a trick, and it's worked brilliantly. You see, prior to the mid to late 1600s, in the colonies of what would become the United States, there was no such thing as the white race. Those of us of European descent did not refer to ourselves by that term really ever before then.
Obama a ‘light-skinned’ African-American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.
The word ‘race’ is ghettoizing language that perpetuates seeing people of color as a different species. The word encourages fear and distrust. Language is the fuel that feeds the great racist generator… for the sake of sharing a common though inaccurate language in order to foster a solution, most of us, myself included, will continue to talk about race as if it actually existed — and racism because it does actually exist.
Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.
The Negro was invented in America.
He [Barack Obama] was light-skinned with no Negro dialect.
We've been fighting our whole lives to say we're just human beings like everyone else. When we start separating ourselves in our work, that doesn't help the cause. I've heard it for years: 'How do you feel being a black filmmaker?' I'm not a black filmmaker, I'm a filmmaker. I'm a black man, I have black children. But I'm just a filmmaker.
It really upsets me that the media insists on turning 'Do the Right Thing' or 'Boyz N the Hood' into 'black films.' They are American films. They may open the window on the black experience, but they had things to say to everybody. That's why they were so successful.
I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn't identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.
It’s a sordid business this divvying us up by race.
Nobody is totally white in Brazil.
Definitely in the West, we're all cast as the same now. Whether you're Indian, Pakistani, Arab, Iranian, Afghan or whatever, you just get thrown into this category. And nine times out of 10, you're depicted as bad.
One drop of black blood and you're black. That was the rule. That's what kept the wall between whites and blacks was this one drop rule. So I was raised with absolutely no ambiguity about that.
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.
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.
Either we want to have segregation or integration. And if we don't want segregation, then we need to get rid of channels like BET and the BET Awards and the Image Awards, where you're only awarded if you're black.
I haven't gotten labeled as a Hispanic actor.
People always say 'You do racial comedy.' And I don't, exactly. I do cultural comedy. Because race and culture are two different things. There's black people from America and then there's black people from Africa. Racially, they're the same; culturally, they're extremely different.
The so called white races are really pinko-grey.
The first thing that always pops into my head regarding our president, is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him... They just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white - very white; American, Kansas, middle of America. There is no argument about who he is, or what he is. America's first black president hasn't arisen yet. He's not America's first black president. He's America's first mixed-race president.
Here's the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it's put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don't call them a white film. I'm trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.
It's too easy to say this or that is "race," and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.
When you're biracial, people sort of make you gray - you're not black, you're not white, you're sort of gray; you're 'other.' And I'm fortunate to have parents that were strong enough to say, 'You're not 'other.' You're special.'
The privileged position of whiteness doesn't allow for someone with one drop of Negro blood to be considered white, which allows whiteness to be a fairly pure category while blackness has to absorb an expansive reality of representation.
I feel that if you can transcend the color of your skin, with your talent, why carry that as a badge or a label?
