“Race is not, as I have often been reminded while working on this project, a system of classification: it is a system of oppression. There has never been, and I can't imagine how there could ever be...”

“When you've learned to both see and not see the resemblance, then you see the uniqueness.”

“We have disagreements as to what race does and ought to mean, but we have a remarkable consensus on what it is, without any ability to define it technically.”

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”

“I got a text from my husband. Manal, you are divorced, it read. Your papers are in the court of Khobar. I was divorced in my absence, just as I had been married.”

“The saddest feeling is knowing you deserve freedom and still feeling caged.”

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

“The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to just...”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be ...”