353 Quotes by J. C. Watts

Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn’t do this out of compassion or guilt. It’s done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.

I’m not one that believes that affirmative action should be based on one’s skin color or one’s gender, I think it should be done based on one’s need, because I think if you are from a poor white community, I think that poor white kid needs a scholarship just as badly as a poor black kid.

I embrace my blackness, just as I do my conservatism and my Christianity, but I don’t want to be defined or pigeonholed by any one of the many elements that make up my character.

I don’t know if anybody has moved up the ladder more quickly than I have.

Like any group that has endured much, African Americans have created a strong and mutually reinforcing sense of group identity. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself.

Well, Mark, I led the charge for five or six years to get reforms for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I was chairman of an organization called ‘FM Policy Focus.’ What we were saying was, if there was blip in the housing market, Fannie and Freddie would destabilize the greatest economy in the world.

I am willing to compete on my merits and on my character – not with the color of my skin. We talk about being a color-blind society, but I don’t think the political process could actually handle that.

You always hear ‘black Republican,’ but you never hear ‘white Democrat.’ We’ve got to get beyond the labels and stereotypes. Other people have hang-ups about it. I don’t.

The more I ponder some of the boneheaded decisions GOP candidates have made of late, I can’t bring myself to believe that they are serious about capturing more than about 8 percent of the black vote.