Talking About Race Quotes

#1. Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is.

Bell Hooks

#2. As a country, we are in a state of denial about issues of race and racism. And too many of our leaders have concluded that the way to remedy racism is to simply stop talking about race.

Lani Guinier

#3. And what happens a lot of times when - let's just speak specifically white and black - when white or black people feel misunderstood when it comes to talking about race, they immediately get defensive.

Regina King

#4. I talk about race a lot. It's been my work ever since I came out of acting school. But it's true that in a way talking about race is a taboo. Because so many of our debates about race have to do not with race but with what we are willing to see, what we will not see and what we don't want to see.

Anna Deavere Smith

#5. We see through the eyes of children that they're not talking about race the way we grown folks are. They're not talking about color or how much melanin is in someone's skin.

John Boyega

#6. There's sort of a persistent misperception that talking about race is black folk's burden. Ultimately, only men can end sexism, and only white people can end racism.

Benjamin Todd Jealous

#7. If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race.

Jamaica Kincaid

#8. Better to go hungry than to be alone. Because when you're alone - and I'm talking here
about an enforced solitude not of our choosing - it's as if you were no longer part of the
human race

Paulo Coelho

#9. The pulpit and the optimist are always talking about the human race's steady march toward ultimate perfection. As usual, they leave out the statistics. It is the pulpit's way - the optimist's way.

Mark Twain

#10. In the winter I was with Nelson Piquet. He was talking about his capacity to race faster. He said that he was still learning new things all the time.

Jean Alesi

#11. I am a member of the human race. There's a certain irony about the cyberworld. You don't know who is talking to you, if it's a machine, so I tend to try to reach out to those fellow humans.

Tim Daly

#12. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned.

Jacob Bronowski

#13. When you are honest in your comedy, you have to acknowledge the world that you're in. Through a comedic voice, you're talking about what needs to be talked about, whether it's race relations or politics or anything that's happening on a global or an American scale.

Trevor Noah

#14. And when you start talking about the practicality of winning a race like that - you've got to remember we're not talking about winning 51 percent of the vote. We're talking about winning 36, 37, 38 percent of the vote.

Hamilton Jordan

#15. C'mon everybody, yeah, this is your life I'm talking about a revolution we gotta organize We don't need no segregation, we don't need no race New age revelation, I think we got a case. I'm OK as long as u are here with me Sexuality is all we ever need.

Prince

#16. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?

W.E.B. Du Bois

#17. Media are focused on comments Michael Jordan made about race which appear in my book. He made those comments years ago, talking of his youth

Roland Lazenby

#18. And if we're talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.

Nic Pizzolatto

#19. Everybody does good things, but I'm talking about making major changes in the educational system that would impact an entire race. I'm talking about stopping these young gang members from killing one another. I'm talking about keeping prisons from overflowing.

Jim Brown

#20. Okay listen, you think I'm so inconsequential? Then try this on for size. All those who see unworthiness when they look at me and are given thereby to denying me value - to you I say, I'm not talking about being AS GOOD as you. I hereby declare myself BETTER than you.

Sidney Poitier

#21. The families in positions of great financial power obsessively interbreed with each other. But I'm not talking about one Earth race, Jewish or non-Jewish. I'm talking about a genetic network that operates through all races, this bloodline being a fusion of human and reptilian genes.

David Icke

#22. When you voice your disagreement, begin by talking about what you have in common with the person you are arguing with. Too often we rush to judgment, race to argue, and overlook all the common ground we share.

Matthew Kelly

#23. Where writers are from is one of the world' s most boring topics. Where we're born, gender or race, wealth or poverty - those are the things we spend time talking about. Stop trying to label me. I'm a writer. Worry about whether I'm any good!

M. J. Hyland

#24. And then there's this guy, Barack Obama, who lost - I could take up a whole afternoon talking about his failures, but - he lost his first race for Congress, and now he gets to call himself my husband

Michelle Obama

#25. You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

Brene Brown

#26. If there's anyone in space, what they'll learn about the human race will be listening to us talking on the car phone.

Roger McGuinn

#27. Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize - and again and again - the wholeness of the human experience.

Ralph Ellison

#28. War is a contest, and you finally get to a point where you are talking merely about race suicide, and nothing else.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#29. A lot of the listeners don't realize that the Daytona 24 Hours is the most difficult race in the world. It's 24 hours, a lot of darkness because it's held at the end of January, so you're talking about 13-14 hours of darkness.

Scott Pruett

#30. I'm talking about the language of flowers. It's from the Victorian era, like your name. If a man gave a young lady a bouquet of flowers, she would race home and try to decode it like a secret message. Red roses mean love; yellow roses infidelity. So a man would have to choose his flowers carefully.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh