QuoteProject
Blackness has always been stigmatised, even amongst black people who flee from the density of that blackness. Some black people recoil from black people who are that dark because it has always been stigmatised.
Kerry James Marshall
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote reflects on the internalized stigma and biases surrounding blackness within and outside the black community.

Kerry James Marshall highlights the complex relationship that some individuals within the black community have with the concept of blackness. The stigma associated with being 'black' often leads to a sense of shame or discomfort, causing individuals to distance themselves from darker-skinned peers. This multifaceted perception reveals the deep-rooted societal prejudices that exist not only externally but also within the community itself, emphasizing the need for acceptance and unity in diversity.

Themes

BlacknessStigmaIdentityCommunityAcceptance

In practice

Example use cases

In discussions about racial identity at a cultural workshop.

More from Kerry James Marshall

You have to recover the capacity to imagine yourself as an ideal and figure out how to project that into the world.
Kerry James MarshallRead
In Western Catholicism, darkness was evil. In the colonial and imperial context, dark skin was always weak, powerless, subjugated. If you see these images all the time, they become commonplace, and they no longer become a spectacular or sensational thing.
Kerry James MarshallRead
My introduction to art history was like everybody else's. You see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yes, these things are great. But I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at.
Kerry James MarshallRead
If you think about the way we experience art, the paradigm is still Western European. If I go to the National Gallery, what am I going to see the most of? I'm not going to see a whole lot of black figures in pictures.
Kerry James MarshallRead
When you go to an art museum, the thing you're least likely to encounter is a picture of a black person. When it comes to ideas about art and about beauty, the black figure is absent.
Kerry James MarshallRead
The history of political movements in the African diaspora is that the solution to the problem is never in the hands of people who are advancing the movement. I try and operate on my own terms.
Kerry James MarshallRead

Similar quotes

Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?
Peter KropotkinRead
May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God who is the Father, Son and Spirit.
Brennan ManningRead
Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.
Gilles DeleuzeRead
To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself.
Leonard CohenRead
Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which is soars to the truth.
Pope John Paul IiRead
I fear that too many have sadly surrendered their agency to the adversary and are saying by their conduct, 'I care more about satisfying my own desires than I do about bearing the Savior's power to bless others.'
Russell M. NelsonRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.