A Quote by Roxane Gay

Readers need to stop assuming characters are white if race isn't explicitly defined.

Roxane Gay

Quote Topics

Assuming Characters Defined Need Race Readers Stop White

Quote Author

Roxane Gay
American - Writer

White people have basically been encouraged for most of recent history in America to think of themselves as outside of race. White people do have race. They need to understand how their race has been constructed as artificially as everybody else's.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

I've been very lucky to have played a variety of characters, and they weren't defined by their race.

Riz Ahmed

In a culture defined by shades of gray, I think the absolute black and white choices in dark young adult novels are incredibly satisfying for readers.

Maggie Stiefvater

I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."

Jon Weisman

It is claimed, but with what truth we cannot say, that there is a well-defined propaganda among the aliens of colour to bring about the degeneration of the white race.

Emily Murphy

Growing up in London, with a hippie mom, I don't know that I'm most people's definition of what a black person is. I'm mixed, yes, but in the world I'm defined as black before I'm defined white. I've never been called white.

Carmen Ejogo

When writers are self-conscious about themselves as writers they often keep a great distance from their characters, sounding as if they were writing encyclopedia entries instead of stories. Their hesitancy about physical and psychological intimacy can be a barrier to vital fiction. Conversely, a narration that makes readers hear the characters' heavy breathing and smell their emotional anguish diminishes distance. Readers feel so close to the characters that, for those magical moments, they become those characters.

Jerome Stern

The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists... Keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed - not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.

Noel Ignatiev

VR is going to be defined by the content that is designed explicitly for virtual reality.

Palmer Luckey

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

Ann Brashares

As white authors, bloggers, and readers, we must stop promoting diversity as a business opportunity or a chance to buy ally points with our disposable income.

Jennifer Armintrout

...What we need to do in the community, and in the city, and in the state. We need to stop airing our differences in front of the white man. Put the white man out of our meetings, number one, and then sit down and talk shop with each other. [That's] all you gotta do.

Malcolm X

Church and State should be united in the White Man's religion. - Global White Racial Loyalty and Solidarity must be our constant goal. - Race is everything. In order to survive and prosper, the White Race must overcome its five main enemies: Judaism, Christianity, Communism, Liberalism and Nationalism.

Ben Klassen

People approach people of color with preconceived ideas. I don't think this is just restricted to white people, but I think that lots of black and white artists, when race is a subject matter, they put race or the ideology around race first. They don't see the person and the complications of the human being.

Hilton Als

We've got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White House, but from every house in America.