“It so happens that I never talk about race. I do not know what race is.”

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Source: Just Listen

And those of us who live in racialized bodies feel that lack, we feel that erasure, so yes, there was something quite deliberate in my doing half the speech as an alien.
On race still being a taboo topic in the world of science fiction in “Interview: Nalo Hopkinson” http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-nalo-hopkinson/ in Lightspeed (June 2013)

As quoted in "The Real Love Story in To All the Boys I've Loved Before Is Between Lana Condor and Jenny Han" in Glamour (24 August 2018) https://www.glamour.com/story/the-real-love-story-in-to-all-the-boys-ive-loved-before

Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell

Blogcritics interview (2007)
Context: For me, the characters are part of the story, and come out of its development. I don't base them on people, or parts of people – the Frankenstein method. I base them on what I've noticed about the human race. … I cannot tell you how stories develop. I have an initial idea, and start telling myself the story, day by day.

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003), p. xi

Source: Law and Authority (1886), I
Context: They see a race of law-makers legislating without knowing what their laws are about; today voting a law on the sanitation of towns, without the faintest notion of hygiene, tomorrow making regulations for the armament of troops, without so much as understanding a gun; making laws about teaching and education without ever having given a lesson of any sort, or even an honest education to their own children; legislating at random in all directions, but never forgetting the penalties to be meted out to ragamufffins, the prison and the galleys, which are to be the portion of men a thousand times less immoral than these legislators themselves.