Skin Color Quotes

“That mess about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin—that's some bullshit. Nobody has the right to judge anybody else. Period. If you ain't been in my skin, you ain't never gonna understand my character.”
― Emily Raboteau, The Professor's Daughter

“Hating skin color is contempt for God's divine creative imagination. Honoring it is appreciation for conscious, beautiful-love-inspired diversity.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence

“Amazing how eye and skin color come in many shades yet many think sexuality is just gay or straight.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“Being a Negro’s a lie, anyway. Nobody sees the real you. Nobody knows who you are inside. You just judged on what you are on the outside whatever your color. Mulatto, colored, black, it don’t matter. You just a Negro to the world.”
― James McBride, The Good Lord Bird

“When I lived on the Bluff in Yokohama I spend a good deal of my leisure in the company of foreign residents, at their banquets and balls. At close range I was not particularly struck by their whiteness, but from a distance I could distinguish them quite clearly from the Japanese. Among the Japanese were ladies who were dressed in gowns no less splendid than the foreigners’, and whose skin was whiter than theirs. Yet from across the room these ladies, even one alone, would stand out unmistakably from amongst a group of foreigners. For the Japanese complexion, no matter how white, is tinged by a slight cloudiness. These women were in no way reticent about powdering themselves. Every bit of exposed flesh—even their backs and arms—they covered with a thick coat of white. Still they could not efface the darkness that lay below their skin. It was as plainly visible as dirt at the bottom of a pool of pure water. Between the fingers, around the nostrils, on the nape of the neck, along the spine—about these places especially, dark, almost dirty, shadows gathered. But the skin of the Westerners, even those of a darker complexion, had a limpid glow. Nowhere were they tainted by this gray shadow. From the tops of their heads to the tips of their fingers the whiteness was pure and unadulterated. Thus it is that when one of us goes among a group of Westerners it is like a grimy stain on a sheet of white paper. The sight offends even our own eyes and leaves none too pleasant a feeling.”
― Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

“Dogs ain't perfect. But I'll tell you one thing where we rule: tolerance.
For us, a dog is a dog is a dog. I see a Great Dane, I say howdy. I run into a puggle, it's Glad to meet ya, how's it goin', smelled any good pee lately?
Go to a dog park and you'll see. We are equal opportunity playful. You sniff my rear, I sniff yours.
You don't see that with humans, obviously. Constantly seeing differences where none exist. All those things like skin color? Dogs could care less. You think I won't hang with a dalmatian 'cause he's spotted? Or a sharpei 'cause she's wrinkled?
I'm not saying I love every dog I meet. (Snickers comes to mind.)
But I'll always give a dog the benefit of the doubt. Life is short. Play is good. And there are plenty of tennis balls to go around.”
― Katherine Applegate, The One and Only Bob

“Scarlight makes the mind, sunlight makes the skin.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“The climate defines your skin color. A white person from a cold country will become a black person in the tropics, but the adaptation process takes thousands of years.”
― Steven Magee

“Many black people in the UK are vitamin D deficient.”
― Steven Magee

“The climate defines the skin color and skeleton structure.”
― Steven Magee

“Skin diversity is here to be celebrated.”
― Humanityisdiversity.org

“She was certain she looked more like a chipmunk than a criminal, if chipmunks were lavender and gray. Her mother had purple skin, while her father was tinted more pink, and Terlu had ended up an agreeable shade of lavender, which matched nicely with the gray cotton.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, The Enchanted Greenhouse

“He also looked very handsome, even though there was a smear of dirt on his gold-hued cheek that she very much wanted to wipe off. She resisted the urge, though, since he was looking at her with so much confusion and alarm in his face that she thought he might flee if she tried.
She knew what he was seeing when he looked at her: a short, plump, pastel-colored woman who was pretty in the same kind of harmless way that bunnies are pretty.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, The Enchanted Greenhouse

“Staring out from a movie poster on the wall of the dinky town cinema were her sister's two bright blue eyes. Brigid was the star of the summer's blockbuster movie.
"That fucking bitch!" Phoebe swore a little too loudly. An old lady gasped and two teenage girls froze in their tracks. "It's my sister!" Phoebe tried to explain.
The two teenage girls tittered and hurried away. Nobody in Nowheresville, Georgia, was going to believe that the unkempt daughter of a swamp-living, Haitian-born artist was related to a lily-white movie star.
Phoebe bought a ticket to the matinee. There, in the dark, empty theater, she watched her sister lop off zombie heads with a samurai sword and sobbed for ninety-four minutes straight.”
― Kirsten Miller, The Women of Wild Hill

“White at last! Gone was the smooth brown complexion. Gone were the slightly full lips and Ethiopian nose. Gone was the nappy hair that he had straightened so meticulously ever since the kink-no-more lotions first wrenched Aframericans from the tyranny and torture of the comb. There would be no more expenditures for skin whiteners; no more discrimination; no more obstacles in his path. He was free! The world was his oyster and he had the open sesame of a pork-colored skin!”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“He was through with coons, he resolved, from now on. He glanced in a superior manner at the long line of black and brown folk on one side of the corridor, patiently awaiting treatment. He saw many persons whom he knew but none of them recognized him. It thrilled him to feel that he was now indistinguishable from nine-tenths of the people of the United States; one of the great majority. Ah, it was good not to be a Negro any longer!”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“Doc sez she's culled, an' she sez so, but she looks mighty white tuh me."

"Everything that looks white ain't white in this man's country," Foster replied.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“Among the working classes, in the next few months, there grew up a certain prejudice against all fellow workers who were exceedingly pale.
The new Caucasians began to grow self-conscious and resent the curious gazes bestowed upon their lily-white countenances in all public places. They wrote indignant letters to the newspapers about the insults and discriminations to which they were increasingly becoming subjected. They protested vehemently against the effort on the part of employers to pay them less and on the part of the management of public institutions to segregate them.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“His skin, ginger
mine, peony

And, between us, now
the color line”
― Ailish Hopper, Dark~Sky Society

“The boy is a palimpsest of paint--
layers of color, history rendering him

that precise shade of in-between.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“we still know white from not.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“It must be the gaze of a benevolent viewer
upon her, framed as she is in the painting's
romantic glow, her melancholic beauty
meant to show the pathos of her condition:
black blood--that she cannot transcend it.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“Every day I am asked to care about white people,
especially if they’ve been kidnapped overseas
or are experiencing marital problems in New England,
on screens large & small. I am told American
lives are in danger, American libidos.

In 2042, when white people become the minority,
will the news continue to chirp American lives are in danger
or will we have to specify white & add no, really
& their lives matter, too.”
― Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

“was a green-yellow-brown Mexican in a Greyhound bus
you ever noticed green-yellow-brown Mexicans at the depot
was every color & tone & texture except White or Brown”
― Juan Felipe Herrera, Every Day We Get More Illegal

“A funny thing happened,

you said, and laughed.
An old man with piercing
eyes stopped you
on your way up,
and said,
It's nice to see you.

Who was he?--you wondered.
Nice to see you too,
you'd muttered.
He wailed

I miss my darkies!

And then he burst
into tears, turned and left.
You were puzzled, you said.
You felt sorry for him, you said.

My chest heaved.
I couldn't speak.

That night, on our drive home,
as our guests slept in the back seat,
I told you what he meant.”
― Zilka Joseph, In Our Beautiful Bones

“well-dressed kindly folk
with their children and some elderly folks trailing
and one or two couples who are black
are skipping along too
I don't see any brown-skinned ones
maybe we are welcome too who knows
they want to add us to the flock”
― Zilka Joseph, In Our Beautiful Bones

“i was a southern Negro man playing music
married to a high yellow woman who loved my unheard
face, who slept with me in nordic
beauty.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Does Your House Have Lions ?

“Lean bodies. Shadows
Incarnate with a grace
Both dark and bright.

As though the world
Were showing off. Black,
Like sable. Like the deep
Center of the darkest fruit,

The first fig. Primordial.”
― Tracy K. Smith, The Body's Question

“At first sight
Of those bodies,
Like mine
Or any other--

No: like mine
But intact--why
Did those men,
Asway that entire day,

Seadrunk
On parched land,
Not think:
The Lord is Grand.

Why was that riddle
Not something
They knelt to? Why,
Instead, did they take it as a sign

That their want
Should lead them?
The riddle
Doesn't go away.”
― Tracy K. Smith, The Body's Question

“Chinese ancestry notwithstanding, Kama wanted Dune to always know her Blackness as the first nonnegotiable aspect of who she was. "Every light-skinned Black person comes from a lineage of dark-skinned Black people and something else. For a lot of them, that light skin was a wound, from an act of violence and domination. And for a lot of us, every day, whiteness tries to make light skin wound the rest of us. But for you? You come from a love story. You come from two lineages of oppressed peoples who found love with each other.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Grievers