Quotes on Black

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person.

Fundamentally, footballers don't look around a dressing room and think, 'He's a black player... he's Japanese.' They don't think like that. They think, 'He's a good player; he can help. He's not very good.' I'm not trying to defend anyone's actions, but there are going to be isolated incidents because it's an emotive, passionate sport.

We need to encourage black women to know that they are authors of their own destiny, that they have important stories to tell, and that they are capable, so magically capable, of writing them and creating important pieces of work that will live forever in history.

A child comes to see his father play, have fun, make people happy, and what does he see? He sees people booing his father for being black. They make monkey noises. They throw bananas at his teammates and all that.

In the area of economic justice, we still have a long way to go. We have too many people who are discriminated against just because they happen to be black or they happen to be a woman or some other minority.

When I started modeling, they tried to pay black models less than they paid Caucasian models. I turned down those jobs because I knew what I was worth.

And although I have seen nothing but black crows in my life, it doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a white crow. Both for a philosopher and for a scientist it can be important not to reject the possibility of finding a white crow. You might almost say that hunting for 'the white crow' is science's principal task.

Black women rock the cradle, and whoever rocks the cradle rocks the future.

You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.

There is, for me, as a black woman, as an African woman, a sense of possibility in America that I don't feel when I'm in Europe.

I'm a gay black guy. If I can't ask questions without caring what people think of me, who can?

Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.

When President Kennedy was elected, many black Americans, like so many Americans, were captivated by his youth and energy and promise and were especially hopeful that he might move the country in a new direction on civil rights.

I’s been livin’ a long time in yesterday, Sandy chile, an’ I knows there ain’t no room in de world fo’ nothin’ mo’n love. I know, chile! Ever’thing there is but lovin’ leaves a rust on yo’ soul. An’ to love sho ‘nough, you got to have a spot in yo’ heart fo’ ever’body – great an’ small, white an’ black, an’ them what’s good an’ them what’s evil – ‘cause love ain’t got no crowded-out places where de good ones stay an’ de bad ones can’t come in. When it gets that way, then it ain’t love.

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.

When you lift up black women, you lift up entire communities and the entire country.

Why was she always so craven, so apologetic? He had always seen Ruth as separate, good and untainted. As a child, his parents had appeared to him as starkly black and white, the one bad and frightening, the other good and kind. Yet as he had grown older, he kept coming up hard in his mind against Ruth's willing blindness, to her constant apologia for his father, to the unshakeable allegiance to her false idol.