Maybe it's a generational thing, but I never wanted to be the best black dancer in the world. I just wanted to be the best.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes striving for personal excellence rather than being defined by race or external expectations.
Judith Jamison highlights the importance of universal ambition and personal achievement over societal categories and labels. By expressing her desire to be simply the best, she challenges the notion that one's identity should limit or define their aspirations, advocating for a focus on individual talent and greatness irrespective of racial identity.
In practice
In a speech about diversity in the arts, this quote can emphasize the importance of individual talent over racial labels.
As a dancer, you really try to stay true to whatever the choreographer/artistic director is giving you. So, now the shoe is on the other foot and I have to trust everyone else - I have to trust the dancer. As I was trusted as a dancer, I trust my dancers.
It's never too early to teach your children about the tool of money. Teach them how to work for it and they learn pride and self-respect. Teach them how to save it and they learn security and self-worth. Teach them how to be generous with it and they learn love.
We can go on talking about racism and who treated whom badly, but what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wallow in that or are you going to create your own agenda?
I've always felt that complement of opposites: body and soul, solitude and companionship, and in the dance studio, contraction and release, rise and fall.
You wake up white, and you think about certain things every day. You wake up black, and you think about certain things. You wake up Chinese, and you think certain things - but those things aren't major. What's major is that you are good at your craft.
You don't enter a dance studio and say "I can't do that." If you do, then why are you in the studio in the first place?
The two most important requirements for major success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.
Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having their own racial or ethnic leaders to follow.
One's only security in life comes from doing something uncommonly well.
Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
Fortune may have yet a better success in reserve for you and they who lose today may win tomorrow.
I like trying to win. That's what golf is all about.
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