Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People always ask me: 'Do you have black in you? Do you have Spanish in you?'
A lot of people have called me the black Bette Midler, and I regard that as a compliment.
I've had a black guy call me a honky, and I've also been told that white people smell like bologna.
It's barely OK for me to be dressed up as a black guy. But part of me kind of enjoys provoking people.
I can't think of the last Asian that I ran into that talked about internment camps. But black people always want to talk to me about slavery.
I've been into guns ever since I was a little kid, and the ones that fascinate me most are the black powder guns that people used back in the 17 and 1800s.
There's no white comic that sells tickets to black people like me. They're going to get their hair done, get a new outfit, and come out to see a white dude.
Some black people who have not heard me interviewed or read my book jump to conclusions and prejudge me... I've been called Uncle Tom. I've been called an Oreo.
I was the only Black person on the set. It was unusual for me to be in a circumstance in which every move I made was tantamount to representation of 18 million people.
I don't really know what 'a dark place' means. I have windows in my house, and I'm generally an upbeat person! A lot of people throw that word at me because I wear a lot of black and leather.
Fox News never calls up Bobby Seale to articulate a stance in opposition to right-wing conservatives. To me, giving the New Black Panthers a platform on Fox is a subtle tactic to scare people.
Black folk who don't realize I'm mixed will treat me like I'm some racist person, or when white people find out I'm black, they treat me with racism, and I don't feel like I belong or fit in anywhere.
Few people younger than me know that it was once normal to see fields white with mushrooms, or rivers black with eels at the autumn equinox, or that every patch of nettles was once reamed by caterpillars.
In the 1970s people were afraid to call me black because they thought it was an insult. They would say 'coloured.' Now it has gone full circle. It's not an issue. The intention is the most important thing.
Do you have any idea what Ali meant to black people? He was the leader of a nation, the leader of Black America. As a young black, at times I was ashamed of my color; I was ashamed of my hair. And Ali made me proud.
I never thought black people would say I wasn't black enough. It didn't turn me into a bully - it just put me on the defensive. I had to watch my back. It made me stronger because I learned how to deal with ignorance.
America to me is where I grew up: in Brooklyn, around other black and Latino people who helped and loved each other. I just want to show people that America doesn't have to be this 'I'm in the NRA, blah blah blah' type of place.
I hated, when I was a kid, being told that 'Black people don't do that.' And the white kids at school didn't accept me because I was black, and the black kids in my neighborhood didn't accept me because they thought I thought I was white.
I always enjoyed playing ball, and it didn't matter to me whether I played with white kids or black. I never understood why an issue was made of who I played with, and I never felt comfortable, when I grew up, telling other people how to act.
Calling Michelle 'Obama Barack's baby mama?' Tell me, is that acceptable? But the Obamas aren't the only targets. Fox's pattern of race-baiting and fear-mongering regularly focuses on black leaders, black institutions and ordinary black people.
I will not sit in a room with black people when the N word is used. I know it was meant to belittle a person, so I will not sit there and have that poison put on me. Now a black person can say, 'Oh, you know, I can use this word because I'm black.'
Heavy metal to me is this cartoon idiom where people have their hair stuck-up all over the place dyed blonde with black roots showing through and Spandex trousers and chains around their neck, eating raw meat on stage. It just doesn't mean anything to me.
I used to be offended when people would compare me to Erykah Badu. Because I'm black, thick, and have large lips? There's nothing similar about us whatsoever, and I felt very disrespected by the fact that people needed to pigeonhole me. I wasn't even raised on Erykah Badu!
Wherever I go, people ask: 'What is she? What is she?' There has always been an agenda - they're excluding me or including me in something with that question. It is the first thing agents in Los Angeles ask me. And then I'd hear: 'You're not black enough, you're too black, you're Italian - no, you're Spanish.'
Certainly I feel like I'm the tip of the arrow at times because certainly the national media wants to talk about the fact that I'm a black Republican and some people think of that as zany that a black person would be a conservative but to me what is zany is any person black, white, red, brown or yellow not being a conservative.