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When I was a kid, my parents never let me use race as an excuse. They'd say, 'When you walk into a room and it's all white, those kids have to work to stand out, not you.'

I'm very light, so some people don't really know that I'm black. I've been in situations where people will say something kind of racist, and I'll step in, and they'll be like, 'Oh, well, you're light.' That still doesn't cut it, buddy.

I feel like I'm able to relate to all races of people because when you learn to tap into the raw emotion of a person, that goes past color.

I never really had to put much thought into my race, and neither did anybody else. I knew I was black. I knew there was a history that accompanied my skin color, and my parents taught me to be proud of it. End of story.

I see how people look at me, all around the world. They see something because of the race I belong to. I have to understand that and put it into my music.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, 'We're black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we're all brought up differently.'

You know, I don't play the race card a lot. I'm half-black, half-white, and I'm proud of - my skin is brown. The world sees me as a black man, but my mother didn't raise me as a black man. She didn't raise me as a white guy.

If you're of multiple races, you have a different challenge, a unique challenge of embracing all of who you are but still finding a way to identify yourself and I think that's often hard for us to do.

Traditionally, I have no right to talk about race. I'm white; I didn't grow up in an all-black neighborhood. But the license I see for myself is I'm a member of the world.

The race is your face. Obviously, I come from a mixed background. Who I am and how I look and being black.