A Quote by Carlos Mencia
I've gotten in trouble with every race you can imagine. They say, 'I can't believe you talked about this - you're racist.' And I say, 'How can I be racist? Isn't racism exclusionary? If all of you are offended, that means I'm including every race in my jokes.'
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I'm inspired by people like Nelson Mandela. Can you imagine - you know how racist America was back then - imagine how racism was in South Africa when he had to stand up and say what he had to say. That's bravery beyond comprehension.
Sometimes if I really want to get someone's attention, I'll start a sentence with something like, "I'm not racist, but..." I say, "I'm not racist, but you look great today." They say, "That wasn't racist at all." I said, "I know. I said I'm not racist. You never listen. Typical Mexican."
I've gotten in trouble with every race you can imagine.
We don't discuss race, so just the discussion of race has become racist. We've been trained that it's such a lightning rod that we don't even want to say the word.
It's not enough to just say 'I'm not racist' because you're not a purveyor of overt racism. If you benefit from the system, knowing that people are being oppressed and affected by it, then you are racist.
In comedy, I often see so many weird race jokes, and it's like, there is no racial diversity in your show to even make those race jokes. The problem is that there is no one in the back to say, 'Hey, that race joke is not really appropriate.'
The race thing is sort of a misnomer. It's just the human race, right? That's it. The rest of it, and racism, is socially constructed. Nobody is born racist, no one. What happens is other things that are usually based on power, money, feeling good about yourself, or bad about yourself, those things play into hating other people for whatever reason.
In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven't lynched somebody then you can't be called a racist. If you're not a bloodsucking monster, then you can't be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters.
I've been demonized as a racist and an extremist. Now, no matter what I say, I mean, I've served in the military with people of all ethnicities and all races but it doesn't matter what I say, I still get demonized and implied to be a racist. So if anybody has any questions on where I stand on that they can ask my good friend Doug Taft who is sitting here on the side and ask him what he thinks about me being a racist.
I think some people feel that if you question the reality of race, you're questioning racism; you're saying racism isn't real. Racism is real because people actually believe race is real. We'd have to really let go of the 500-year-old idea of race as a worldview in order to undo racism.
I honestly thought that since I didn't associate myself with any people or groups who were outwardly racist, and I didn't act in a way that struck me as racist, that this meant that I myself was not a racist, and that racism wasn't a huge issue.
I don't know what to say about Asians. I think everyone is "racist," to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at (for example skin color, bone structure), but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.
When generally people make race-based jokes to me - even if they're not technically racist, they're sort of based on me being Pakistani or whatever - on Twitter, you know, I block a lot of people who say something weird about my name or something. It does bug me generally, but it is all about context.
Racist societies enforce the idea of race as home by making race an inescapable fate.
I very much dislike the word "race," and I never use it. I use the word "racist." Race is not a fact. There is only one race: human. Skin color is less than 2 percent of the DNA.
And my point was one I think that you'd agree with, which is there's no room in America for a black racist, a Latino racist, or a white racist, or an Asian racist, or a Native American racist. Now, we're either color blind or we're not color blind.
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