Quotes on Black

We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.

Being called Black in America is the struggle to keep us moving and breathing over bloody water. Being a Nig**r or [Ni**a] without the context of history is like drowning in bloody water, dragging down those yet knowing to swim.

Black people in America, people from the struggle, immigrants, it's no generational wealth that we are attached to, so we are tasked to create - in one generation - closing the gap. That's why we so Doomsday about getting to the check: 'cause it's life or death for real.

I went to a segregated school; I was born a Negro, not a black man.

My body is very different from most of the dancers I dance with. My hair is different than most I dance with. But I didn't let that stop me. Black girls rock and can be ballerinas.

People only say I'm angry because I'm black and I'm a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do.

I would write my editorials using a manual typewriter in pitch-black darkness... I would produce the whole thing without having seen the text.

I am a black American, I say, and thus announce my atavistic connection to all others who live as black Americans, to all who ever lived as black Americans. Religion, caste, class, gender and race can all be atavisms, and they are inherently anti-democratic because they exclude all outside the atavism.

I realize that I'm black, but I like to be viewed as a person, and this is everybody's wish.

Well, in the '80s and '70s, with the exception of Sidney Poitier and Brock Peters, maybe Ivan Dixon, if you were as big and black as I am, you were a bad guy. Simple. Because in real life, I scare people.

And when I was angry, when I was younger, I was in a cocoon. Now I'm a beautiful, black butterfly.

The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period. They’re operated as holding pens—miniature jails, really. It’s only when black children start breaking out of their pens and bothering white people that society even pays any attention to the issue of whether these children are being educated.

The times when black women have been successful in confronting and overcoming the structural and institutional sexism and racism that persists in our society have been when we are thoughtful and strategic about speaking up. It's when we've done what it takes to introduce and implement our ideas and our plans to make things better.

Growing up on our estate, we were all different colours, but we were all really poor. I never really realised that black was a problem for some people.

The wealth of south Florida, but even more important, the meaning and significance of south Florida lies in the black muck of the Everglades and the inevitable development of this country to be the great tropic agricultural center of the world.

There's no question that O.J. Simpson had been a substitute white man in America. He had gained honorary white status. He was not viewed by many white Americans as black. He was not seen as the African American athlete who was rebellious: Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron... He was accepted in golf clubs that were very tony.

When I was growing up, I was told you could be anything you want to be, but I didn't really believe that because you couldn't be president. Like, I knew that; we never had a black president.

There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.

You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.

I think that, for so much of our matriculation through American society, black people sort of feel like outsiders.

To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world. Black people. And I mean that in every sense.