I want all types of people to look at my work and see themselves, just like I watch a Reese Witherspoon movie as a black woman and can empathize with her because we have had to internalize whiteness in that way to survive.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.

In a time of racial unrest for white America, images of interracial relationships are a proxy for racial progress as long as the race and gender dynamics don't disrupt whiteness.

Blackness better defines who I am philosophically and socially than whiteness does.

The entertainment industry is a microcosm of the real world. To be 'othered' within the industry is a reflection of where we have been cast in the outside world, existing in the margins of society for decades witnessing cisgendered, heterosexual whiteness as the clearly defined default to which we must cater.

My whiteness, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege, family support, and so many other factors shield me from some of the worst possible consequences - often fatal ones - that result from the toxic combination of misogyny, racism, and anti-trans sentiment.

The interesting thing about white power and the desperate white knuckling grip on this thing call whiteness, which is a myth in itself, is that black folks... we're not asking you to invent new laws for us. We're asking you to include us in the laws that are already on the books.

Again and again, I find something eerie in many Irish occasions - the unrelenting whiteness, the emotional tribal attachments, the violent prejudices lurking beneath apparently pleasant social surfaces, the cosy smugness of belonging.

Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.

I don't identify as white. I have a complex relationship with whiteness.

There's this sense that whiteness is the default and does not need to be questioned. That you've got a race if you're black, or any kind of Asian, or any kind of Native American, but that you have no race if you are white.

In America, mixed-race identity tends to invite both curiosity and suspicion, largely because few have found a way to interrogate it without centering whiteness as the scale by which to evaluate blackness.

My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself outside of it. My mother, on the other hand, not only accepted that she would always be an outsider in this country but also believed it to be a finer fate and home than any other she could have had.

'The Cosby Show' was a show about black people that was fundamentally and unequivocally friendly to whiteness and to white people. The Huxtables had white friends.

If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white - which his genes certainly entitled him to do - his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis.

No one tells every white person in this country how to be. No one tells every Hispanic, or Asian or Jewish person in this country how to be. There is no single definition of whiteness or single definition of blackness.

If white people on a larger scale really de-emphasized their whiteness, I think that would have to transform the Republican party into a more responsible party that couldn't get by on just playing into white resentment, especially white middle and working class resentment while taking care of the interests of plutocrats.

White Southerners created an entire cosmetics industry equating beauty with whiteness and trained a string of winning Miss Americas who embodied their racial ideal in a national representative.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.