Jamaica Kincaid Race Quotations

Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.

Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry." If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes "Oh, she's autobiographical."

It's too easy to say this or that is "race," and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.

It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.

"Race." I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both "black" and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can't take them seriously.

The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.

I didn't think of myself as an outsider because of my race because... where I grew up I was the same race as almost everyone else... It is true that I noticed things that no one else seemed to notice. And I think only people who are outsiders do this.