Quotes About African

It's exciting to me that Ride Along is a movie that has two African American leads, but it's even more exciting to me that it's not a movie about two African American leads. They just happen to be African American. It's a universal story. It's a story about a guy in love with a girl, and he's gotta get the approval of the overbearing, mean brother. That's a universal theme.

The central objective in decolonising the African mind is to overthrow the authority which alien traditions exercise over the African. This demands the dismantling of white supremacist beliefs, and the structures which uphold them, in every area of African life. It must be stressed, however, that decolonisation does not mean ignorance of foreign traditions; it simply means denial of their authority and withdrawal of allegiance from them.

We do not have a South African as a member of the African Commission. The President of the Commission comes from Mali, the Deputy comes from Rwanda and then we have got all these other members, ordinary commissioners. There is no South African there. And the reason, again, for that is not because we didn't have South Africans who are competent.

I don't think there are any pure Africans of the African Americans, but the African part of our history was pretty much taken away from us during slavery, so the 60s gave us a chance, because of the civil rights movement, to kind of re-examine and make some sort of formal connection to our African-ness.

We’ve gone through the names—Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that’s an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?

When you talk about evangelicals, don't forget that a significant proportion of the evangelical community is African American. And most African Americans - well over 90 percent, thoroughly evangelical, thoroughly biblical - will probably vote Democratic.

What moved us was not so much what would it do for South Africa, but there has been a great keenness on the Continent that the location of the Pan African Parliament must add to its credibility. And, so we said, fine, it's a contribution to this process of the democratisation of the African Continent.

The writer in me can look as far as an African-American woman and stop. Often that writer looks through the African-American woman. Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.

To understand how Republicans lost the African American vote, we must first understand how we won the African American vote.

I'm one of the few Black writers, or African American writers, who managed to work my way through the system so that it has allowed me to speak in a kind of free way. But most African American writers don't have that. They don't have that opportunity, they don't have that.

Unity will not make us rich, but it can make it difficult for Africa and the African peoples to be disregarded and humiliated. And it will, therefore, increase the effectiveness of the decisions we make and try to implement for our development. My generation led Africa to political freedom. The current generation of leaders and peoples of Africa must pick up the flickering torch of African freedom, refuel it with their enthusiasm and determination, and carry it forward.

I don't regret the fervor, because I do believe, in the African American community but also for other communities, and I know from talking to people, for communities around the world, the election of an African American to the most powerful office on Earth meant things had changed, and not just in superficial ways. That in some irreversible way the world was different.

When you graduate is when you start to find yourself looking at the information in the audition breakdown and it says tall black African - or African-American built such and such. And you start seeing these character descriptions and seeing that, oh, you're only going in for the ones that are described as your look.

When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent.

When you sit in America you miss the open plains and you miss the sound of rain and the smell of rain and the smell of the veld. If you're African it's different and I don't think one will ever become an American or British. It doesn't matter where you move, you will always be a South African.

And you know, we have an African-American president, and you would have thought that he would have done a much better job for African-American citizens of this country. And he hasn't. And I will because I'm going to bring back jobs from China. I'm going to bring back jobs from Mexico and so many other places that are just ripping this country apart.

I hope that more [African-Americans] decide to play after seeing the things that I was able to accomplish; not only myself, but other African-American players. Hopefully, they pick up a bat and a ball and go out there and play.

One of the reasons that the African American actors wanted to be a part of the show was because these people are talking to each other the way that African American people talk to each other, and they said that they didn't see that on TV.

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away.

Most of all, I dislike this idea nowadays that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I've visited Africa, and I've got news for everyone: I'm not an African.

As we move forward, you cannot resolve the potential food crisis or shortages without science being part of the solution. Science has to be part of the solution but African governments - and these are decisions for governments, whether they embrace or do not embrace genetically modified food - and for the moment, most African companies do not accept genetically modified seeds.

During the campaign [Donald Trump] talked about reaching out to African- American voters in particular. He talked about inner cities in a way that did offend some people. Lot of Democrats. Some African- Americans of saying what have you got to lose.

As I said, the matter of the Pan African Parliament was raised with us by other African countries who said we should host.

African-American women who develop breast cancer are more likely to die from the disease than White women of the same age. Survival rates are worse among African-Americans for colon, prostate and ovarian cancers as well.

I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

Because I know that the early Greeks and Romans and the early Europeans at that age did not see racism as we see it now - because racism was created to justify slavery to build the capital for capitalism - and back in the day they respected talent over race. We had an African Pope in the late 5th century, we had an African Emperor of Rome, and early church Fathers were black.

Even if Zuma was to develop the authoritarian impulses of a Mugabe, he would be checked - not least by his own party, which set a continental precedent by ousting Thabo Mbeki in 2007, after it felt he had outstayed his welcome by seeking a third term as party president. The ANC appears to have set itself against that deathtrap of African democracy: the ruler for life.

I look at a stream and I see myself: a native South African, flowing irresistibly over hard obstacles until they become smooth and, one day, disappear - flowing from an origin that has been forgotten toward an end that will never be.

When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers.

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

I feel like I come from a smaller off shoot of black people because I am mixed. People say I’m African American but that doesn’t include the other half of me.

We forget the conditions - not only in slavery - but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today's incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things. We pretend that everything that has happened happened long ago, and then we act as if we all now just treat each other equally, everything will be fine.

I don't want to exaggerate; having as many African American men as we've had in the criminal-justice system, and the amount of time it takes for the damage done by that to wash through our society and our communities, the disadvantages born out of kids being undiagnosed with mental-health problems early, or not getting the kind of exposure to reading and math when they're 4 or 5 or 6 years old, that carries a cost.

People talk about Jim Crow as if it's dead. Jim Crow isn't gone. It's adjusted. Look at the disproportionate sentences meted out to blacks caught up in the criminal justice system. There's a problem when people profit from putting and keeping African Americans in prison. We need to do a better job as a nation understanding the real values the country's built upon in terms of fairness, equality and equal opportunity.

There's an African-American professor at a noted Ivy League school who is saying there's three kinds of white people, and only one of the three different kinds is worth anything, and that they're so tiny and so small a group that you don't need to be worried.

We know that African American students tend to be relational learners. It's about the relationships between a teacher and student. Students respond well to teachers they know, believe in them, care about them, but also who teach in a matter that elicits a more active approach to learning, rather than just sitting and listening. The research on this is strong and has been available for a long time, but it is not widely practiced. That's a huge obstacle.

Because it's unacceptable that the aid worker's chauffeur only speaks his own tribal language, an applicant is needed who also speaks English fluently - and, ideally, one who is also well mannered. So you end up with some African biochemist driving an aid worker around, distributing European food, and forcing local farmers out of their jobs. That's just crazy!

American audiences don't react in the same way as European ones to African music because, I think, Europeans listen to this music through all the festivals that exist here.

People see dark faces out there, and the perception is that they're African American. They're not us. They're impostors.

Having come into contact with a civilization which has over-emphasized the freedom of the individual, we are in fact faced with one of the big problems of Africa in the modern world. Our problem is just this: how to get the benefits of European society - benefits that have been brought about by an organization based upon the individual - and yet retain African's own structure of society in which the individual is a member of a kind of fellowship.

I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains - the drab and dowdy digger in the earth. He is the uncomely but intrepid defender of family, home, and bourgeois convention, and he will fight anything of any size that intrudes upon his smug existence. ... His eyes are small and lightless and capable of but one expression - suspicion. What he does not understand, he suspects, and what he suspects, he fights.

We live in a very powerful country that has worldwide impact. It really is a democracy, so it puts a call to the faithful to get off the couch, right now! I hope we don't have one in three African American kids hungry 10 years from now. There is no reason for that. Forget everything else. We know how to feed kids. We can feed kids without distorting incentives and stuff.

When the Romani people came and settled in Gioia Tauro in the '60s and the '70s, they took over a neighborhood much like Africans are doing now that became like their "ghetto". Obviously, there are immense differences in Romani culture - there is more of a distrust of the outside and less willingness to integrate that stopped it from happening. The illiteracy rate is still very high, and they are still very much keeping themselves sectioned off from the rest of the community. I don't think that's going to happen with the African community.

Using trees as a symbol of peace is in keeping with a widespread African tradition. For example, the elders of the Kikuyu carried a staff from the thigi tree that, when placed between two disputing sides, caused them to stop fighting and seek reconciliation. Many communities in Africa have these traditions.

Miles Davis was a master. In every phase of his career, he understood that this music was a tribute to the African muse.

I often quote an African proverb that says: "The world is not ours, the earth is not ours, It's a treasure we hold in trust for future generations." And I often hope we will be worthy of that trust.

As the old African adage says, 'everybody skin to me ain't kin to me'. So you can't exclusively make that the criteria of your job selection and say that it's right when it's black and discrimination when it's white.

I had been an activist on the issue of HIV, primarily in the African American and Latino communities here in the U.S. for many years. It was horrifying to me how the pandemic was raging right here in this country but no one was talking about it.