Quotes About Race And Identity

#1. I feel like elements of race and identity and ethnicity are sort of missing in all of literature, not just in women's literature.

Cristina Henriquez

#2. This film isn't about "white racism", or racism at all. DEAR WHITE PEOPLE is about identity. It's about the difference between how the mass culture responds to a person because of their race and who they understand themselves to truly be. And this societal conflict appears to be one that many share.

Justin Simien

#3. The act of claiming an identity can be transformational. It can provide healing and empowerment. It can weld solidarity within a community. And, perhaps most importantly, it can diminish power from an oppressor, a dominant group.

Simon Tam

#4. Foisting an identity on people rather than allowing them the freedom and space to create their own is shady.

Raquel Cepeda

#5. I know you don't think that any tongue I speak is mine; it must be rented. I am always denial, or pretense. A child born mid-flight has no nation. I can pull on either culture, but they always melt like a dream, trickle away, water on the oiled pelt of foreign.

Jasmine Ann Cooray

#6. Perhaps finding out that we carry New World history in our genes will transcend racial checkboxes altogether and enable Latino-Americans to rethink what America is supposed to look like.

Raquel Cepeda

#7. Being Latino means being from everywhere, and that is exactly what America is supposed to be about.

Raquel Cepeda

#8. Our identities are as fluid as our personal experiences are diverse.

Raquel Cepeda

#9. Minority conservatives hold a special place of gutter contempt in the minds of unhinged liberals, who can never accept the radical concept of a person of color rejecting identity politics.

Michelle Malkin

#10. If I had a musical identity that was definable then it would be time to get into painting or something else. Race car driving.

Chris Cornell

#11. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

Will Self

#12. My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there.
At least that's what I would choose to believe.

Barack Obama

#13. Most whites do not have a racial identity, but they would do well to understand what race means for others. They should also ponder the consequences of being the only group for whom such an identity is forbidden and who are permitted no aspirations as a group.

Jared Taylor

#14. Being equal does not mean being the same.

Rebekah Elizabeth Gamble

#15. My potential is more than can be expressed within the bounds of my race or ethnic identity.

Arthur Ashe

#16. Without being aware of it, you take many things as being your identity: your body, your race, your beliefs, your thoughts.

Jack Kornfield

#17. He felt that race was not a characteristic that was a part of his identity, but one that was projected upon him by the gaze of others who looked on him; as such it was ephemeral, there and gone as soon as the gaze was broken.

Dexter Palmer

#18. I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

Jess Row

#19. Behind every act in Israel's identity politics stretches, like a long black shadow, the idea of an eternal power and race.

Shlomo Sand

#20. I guess it all depends on whom you ask and when you ask. Race, I've learned, is in the eye of the beholder.

Raquel Cepeda

#21. You can't always choose which. Sometimes you have to BE which.

Jonathan R. Miller

#22. While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me.

Raquel Cepeda

#23. And we should be a welcoming nation. Our identity is not based on race or ethnicity, it's based on a set of shared values. That's American citizenship.

Jeb Bush

#24. In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.

Eric Foner

#25. My parents raised me to not ever look at race or color, so it doesn't have a big part in my self-identity.

Robert Griffin III

#26. The reason we life black people isn't because they're black. We like them because they're not as grey as we are.

John Cage

#27. If America is to be strong in the future, Americans must see America as home, not divided by race or region. Build American jobs for the future and come together with compassion to solve problems.

Phil Mitchell

#28. Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"
they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)

Cornel West

#29. Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, national identity, any of a dozen minor and irrelevant markers. ~ Valentine

Cassandra Clare

#30. I feel like because black Cuban artists don't have the kind of pressure to thematize race in the way that African-American artists do, there's more space for them to do their art without having to discuss it in terms of racial identity.

Rachael Price

#31. I saw her note the way I hovered over the various ethnicities on the form. First the 'white' box, then to the airspace over the 'black' box, a kind of momentary hesitation, a protest of stillness, a staring into the abyss of everything I did not know about myself. She, like me, was made of halves.

Olivia Sudjic

#32. What good's a black face if it means I'm just someone else's property? Why give me these arms and legs just to carry someone else's load, not my own?

Stacey Lee