Quotes on Blacks

Unless young blacks are brought into the mainstream of economic life, they will continue to be on the curbstone.

While he was in the service, in the South and in Oklahoma, he was refused service at a couple of places where he was in uniform, and was told that African Americans, blacks, Negros, were not served. And in spite of that, I've never known a man who loved this country more than my father did.

So much of what blacks and women contend with is centered in how we view, and how the world views, our bodies. Gestures, voices, affect.

I'm building shopping centers and movie theaters in the inner cities. So that means supplying jobs and letting blacks understand that we have to build our communities back, not looking to anybody else.

I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.

We're criminalizing economic inability to stay out of the system. Women get penalized more than men for the same crime; blacks get penalized more than whites for the same crime. We need to bring out more into the light, because it's not fair... I applaud Colin Kaepernick for speaking out.

Blacks in America want to forget about slavery - the stigma, the shame. If you can't be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, and that is the blues.

Robinson was important to all blacks. To make it into the majors and to take all the name calling, he had to be something special. He had to take all this for years, not just for Jackie Robinson, but for the nation.

'Blacks were too scared to do anything, but they came out to greet James Meredith': That would have been the story in the evening news if I hadn't gotten myself shot. I got shot, and that allowed the movement protest thing to take over then and do their thing.

Blacks have experienced a history of victimization in America, beginning obviously in slavery and then another 100 years of segregation. I grew up in segregation. I know very well what it was about and all of the difficulties it placed on black life, and how we were truly held down before the civil-rights movement.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

We know that all interracial groups in South Africa are relationships in which whites are superior, blacks inferior. So as a prelude, whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior.

The ethic of liberal individualism has so deeply permeated the psyches of blacks... of all classes that we have little support for a political ethic of communalism that promotes the sharing of resources.

Part of what our problem as blacks in America is that we don't claim that. Partly, you see, because of the linguistic environment in which we live.

For the better part of two centuries, outsiders have been offering explanations that range from racist to learned-sounding - the supposed inferiority of blacks, the heritage of slavery, overpopulation - for why Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

I never ceased to be surprised when southern whites, at their homes or clubs, told racial jokes and spoke so derogatorily of blacks while longtime servants, for whom they quite clearly had some affection, were well within earshot.

Whites know never tell blacks what you really think and what you really feel because you risk being seen as a racist. And the result of that is that to a degree, we as blacks live in a bubble. Nobody tells us the truth. Nobody tells us what they would do if they were in our situation. Nobody really helps us.

Given the historical power differential between blacks and whites, blacks are required to be attentive to the way their white counterparts see themselves in relation to people of color if they want to survive and even thrive.

For decades, many blacks were reluctant to pursue a profession that was associated with servitude. If you went to school, it was to become a lawyer or doctor. Older generations didn't understand why one would spend money to learn how to chop, peel, dice, and saute vegetables when that trade could be taught at home.

Particularly in the South, efforts continue to be made to deny blacks access to the polls, even where blacks constitute the majority of the voters.

I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It's time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It's time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.