Mixed Race Quotes

“I am not a little bit of many things; but I am the sufficient representation of many things. I am not an incompletion of all these races; but I am a masterpiece of the prolific. I am an entirety, I am not a lack of anything; rather I am a whole of many things. God did not see it needful to make me generic. He thinks I am better than that.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Is Obama Anything but Black?

So lots of folk—mostly non-black—say Obama’s not black, he’s biracial, multiracial, black-and-white, anything but just black. Because his mother was white. But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass had white fathers. Imagine them saying they were not black.

Imagine Obama, skin the color of a toasted almond, hair kinky, saying to a census worker—I’m kind of white. Sure you are, she’ll say. Many American Blacks have a white person in their ancestry, because white slave owners liked to go a-raping in the slave quarters at night. But if you come out looking dark, that’s it. (So if you are that blond, blue-eyed woman who says “My grandfather was Native American and I get discrimination too” when black folk are talking about shit, please stop it already.) In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you. Barack Obama, looking as he does, would have had to sit in the back of the bus fifty years ago. If a random black guy commits a crime today, Barack Obama could be stopped and questioned for fitting the profile. And what would that profile be? “Black Man.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing the person I would become already existed — some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“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

“I'm what the botanists call a hybrid," he said the first time Cora heard him speak, "A mixture of two different families. In flowers, such a concoction pleases the eye. When that amalgamation takes its shape in flesh and blood, some take great offence. In this room we recognize it for what it is - a new beauty come into the world, and it is in bloom all around us.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Don’t let anyone tell you
that you are half anything.”
― Dean Atta, The Black Flamingo

“Le Métèque
Avec ma gueule de métèque, de juif errant, de pâtre grec
Et mes cheveux aux quatre vents
Avec mes yeux tout délavés, qui me donnent l'air de rêver
Moi qui ne rêve plus souvent.
Avec mes mains de maraudeur, de musicien et de rôdeur
Qui ont pillé tant de jardins
Avec ma bouche qui a bu, qui a embrassé et mordu
Sans jamais assouvir sa faim
Avec ma gueule de métèque, de juif errant, de pâtre grec
De voleur et de vagabond
Avec ma peau qui s'est frottée au soleil de tous les étés
Et tout ce qui portait jupon
Avec mon coeur qui a su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffert
Sans pour cela faire d'histoire
Avec mon âme qui n'a plus la moindre chance de salut
Pour éviter le purgatoire.

Avec ma gueule de métèque, de juif errant, de pâtre grec
Et mes cheveux aux quatre vents
Je viendrai ma douce captive, mon âme soeur, ma source vive
Je viendrai boire tes vingt ans
Et je serai prince de sang, rêveur, ou bien adolescent
Comme il te plaira de choisir
Et nous ferons de chaque jour, toute une éternité d'amour
Que nous vivrons à en mourir.
Et nous ferons de chaque jour, toute une éternité d'amour
Que nous vivrons à en mourir.”
― Georges Moustaki

“I knew, deep down, that I was different from my family. I knew just by looking in the mirror.”
― Alex Dalton, A View From The Mountain

“...it is nevertheless plain that a very different-looking class of people are springing up at the south, and are now held in slavery, from those originally brought to this country from Africa; and if their increase will do no other good, it will do away the force of the argument, that God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right. If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“My origins do not haunt me. Attitudes about my origins do.”
― Michelle Paulse

“Raisin in our only outlier for now: her mother is white, she lives in a white neighbourhood, she eats white food, she listens to white music and goes to a white school. In some ways, things will be easier for her, and in others, much harder, because you can belong even less when you come from two separate factions. We struggled towards whiteness, and soon she will have to develop her own definitions for the complexity of being two things at once. I want to stamp brownness on her, but in a way that protects her rather than exposes her. I can't have it both ways.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“The reality of this wide-eyed caramel-coloured wonder was arresting. This was the future, alive and kicking in my arms.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“You can't always choose which. Sometimes you have to BE which.”
― Jonathan R. Miller

“Do you tell your friends you're half brown?' She is passing, always passing for white, and for some reason, I want people to know that she isn't, that we at least tried to have some say in it. I tried to force myself out of brownness at her age, but the older I get, the more I tuck myself into it...

'Some kids know,' she said. 'I don't need to tell everyone.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“They are afraid, Tayo. They feel something happening, they can see something happening around them, and it scares them. Indians or Mexicans or whites—most people are afraid of change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin, the same color of eyes, that nothing is changing.” She laughed softly. "They are fools. They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don't have to think about what has happened inside themselves.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“I used to think Ming was her favorite. But she’s grown too private, too remote. Rachel is lost. And I am too haolefied, what my mother taught me, so we could survive in that other world, the one that killed her”
― Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues

“We got bad blood in us,' Sixto said. 'Some of these wounds get passed down. Same with what we owe. We should be brown. All that white you see that you got on your skin? We gotta pay for what we done to our own people.' Sixto's eyes were closed, his head bent down a little.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“Many Romani activists are in fact of mixed parentage. They are often individuals who grew up within the mainstream culture, ashamed of, or afraid to acknowledge, their Romani family connections. Others are persons of Romani background who acquired an education and spent the early years of their careers capitalizing on their Romani connections by engaging in academic research on Romani culture or providing expertise to public services and institutions on Romani society. They feel a strong commitment to challenging prejudice and to improving the destiny of their people. But many years of their lives have been spent struggling for recognition and acknowledgement among their non-Romani colleagues and peers.”
― Yaron Matras, I Met Lucky People: The Story of the Romani Gypsies

“Being half, I am evidence that race, too, will become relic. Eventually we're all going to be brown, sort of. Some days, when I'm reeling grand, I feel brand-new - like a prototype. Back in the olden days, my dad's ancestors got stuck behind the Alps and my mom's on the east side of the Urals. Now, oddly, I straddle this blessed, ever-shrinking world.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“He still had his tie on, a knitted tie with a flat bottom. It looked crocheted; it looked like a doily. Our biology master wore ties like that but George was the only boy you'd catch dead in one. He was both the oldest and youngest of us, the most fuddy-duddy and innocent, and I could see that his innocence extended to this question of sardonic intent. His poem, alas, was perfectly serious.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“As a little girl, having a mixed background didn’t allow me to have a life as my classmates. I simply didn’t fit in, and was already starting a pattern that would follow me for most of my life.”
― Deborah Bettega, Screen's queen

“I am half-Mexican and half-Chinese. Major used to joke that I believe in reincarnitas.”
― GLEN NESBITT

“If we hybrids have a superpower, it is the ability to side-see, to scour the periphery of stories and a heritage industry that view the world too narrowly. We know the world is a continuum of polar things, and the words “my people” and “my roots” can be a carnival of confusion.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets

“I grew up in Carrollton, Georgia, right on the Alabama line. No other Native American kids that I knew of were in my school, and no one knew what to make of me. One girl told me once that I was mixed. She didn't ask; she declared. I tried to correct her, letting her know I was Native American. She told me that Indians didn't exist anymore.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I think the future of Ukraine is female Ukrainians mating with Western European and USA males, as they will be there in significant numbers in the future during the recovery phase of the war. It will likely become a predominantly mixed race country.”
― Steven Magee