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There was a time when someone would get on a plane and request to move their seat just because the person sitting next to them was of a different ethnicity or religion or nationality. But I don't think my generation wants that. That's how it used to be.

It comes down to this: black people were stripped of our identities when we were brought here, and it's been a quest since then to define who we are.

Disguising your own origins is a deeply American impulse, but that doesn't make it any less compromising. The way I live my life is to try to foreground the tensions and paradoxes of being a white person who's interested in racial justice and reconciliation, rather than disguise or obliterate them.

I wish everybody was just ethnically ambiguous. It would make life a lot easier.

Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.

I feel like decades ago it was either you're black, white, Asian or Hispanic, or whatever, but today we see more of an acceptance for people with multi-nationalities.

I'm still ambiguously ethnic. I could be Persian - I could be anything. But I'm Italian and Jewish, so I'm a citizen of the world; that's what I prefer.

When you single out any particular group of people for secondary citizenship status, that's a violation of basic human rights.

So many people are of mixed heritage; everyone is from somewhere else.

In the past, I have been an immigration reformer, not a restrictionist.