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I used to joke for years that I was a black man. I adopted the black culture, the black race. I married a black woman, and I had black kids. I always considered myself a 'brother.'
Tommy ChongYou can't have anything valuable in your house. Niggers will break in and take it all! Everything white people don't like about black people, black people don't like about black people. It's like our own personal civil war. On one side, there's black people. On the other, you've got niggers. The niggers have got to go. I love black people, but I hate niggers. I am tired of niggers. Tired, tired, tired.
Chris RockArguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.
Michelle AlexanderAnd talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.
Toni MorrisonThe epidemic is truly black-on-black crime. The greatest danger to the lives of young black men are young black men.
C.L. BryantBlack women must help black men understand their full potential lies not in denying black women full access to their humanity and opportunity, but in working diligently to overcome the odds that hamper our progress. Yes, some of that is self-imposed, and we must confront it; and much of it comes from outside. But without courageous and brilliant black women, our communities are greatly diminished.
Michael Eric DysonThe inspiration for this movie [Something New] was this Newsweek article that came out a couple of years ago that talks about 42.4 percent of black women in America aren't married. Black women are shooting up the corporate ladder way faster than our black male counterparts. And (black men) are either dating outside their race, in jail or dying. And so if you want to have a family, you want to be married, you have to look at other options.
Sanaa LathanIf a community of people wears white on a mournful occasion and another dresses in black, then one community would like white and dislike black and the other would like black and dislike white. Moreover, this attitude leaves a physical effect on the cells as well as on the genes in the body.
Muammar al-GaddafiRadical militant feminist believes that women of color and Black women in particular have written the cutting edge theory and really were the individuals who exploded feminist theory into the directions that has made it more powerful. So I see us as the leaders not just of Black people and Black women in terms of feminism but in terms of the movement as a whole.
Bell HooksMy dad, who was creative director in the '60s, always wore black jeans with black desert boots; he thought he was cool. He told me to buy a pair as well. I didn't like black, so I got the sand color, and I've been wearing them since college.
Andy SpadeIf the black man is feeble and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve,and be exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization; for the sake of that element, no wrong nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him: he will survive and play his part. So now, the arrival in the world of such men as Toussaint, and the Haytian heroes, or of the leaders of their race in Barbadoes and Jamaica, outweighs in good omen all the English and American humanity.
Ralph Waldo EmersonNo other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.
Bell HooksTo me, not every black filmmaker who is making black films is trying to make black cinema.
Arthur JafaIt's not the black belt that you wear on your waist. It's the black belt in your heart and knowing that you can go out there and you can do it. That's what a true black belt is.
Bonnie CaninoAs for the not-black black president issue - white people can imagine blacks worse off than them, no problem. And now they can imagine blacks better off, no problem. But they still can't imagine black people who are just like them. That's the real problem. That's racism. Not being able to believe that those others are actually just like you.
Darryl PinckneyThe street is as diverse as any other sector, but in peoples' mind it gets appropriated as a black man who's tough. Trying to make it through by staying hard and phallocentric. To me, that is just an impoverished conception of what it is to be a black male. It doesn't do justice to my grandfather, my father, my brother - or just the black men I grew up with.
Cornel WestWe used to have an all-Black baseball team, all Black stars and when White folks took Jackie Robinson and brought him into the major league that was the beginning of the crushing of Black baseball teams and leagues.
Louis FarrakhanBeing gay is harder than being black. I didn't have to come out black. I didn't have to tell my parents about what its like to be black.
Wanda SykesHere's the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it's put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don't call them a white film. I'm trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.
Kevin HartIt is extremely interesting to me that black males, and other black folk, are viewed as self-pitying, by either other blacks who have failed to accurately calculate their own diminished status as a result of racial animosity - both individual and systemic - or by whites who fail to comprehend how, after forcing black folk into subservience for hundreds of years, they now whine about small privileges that pale - so to speak - in comparison to the untold advantage of centuries of benefit.
Michael Eric DysonBlack ice is the smoothest naturally occuring ice there is, as if nature were condescending to art. ... Black ice is an act of nature as elusive as grace, and far more rare. ... I have never skated on black ice, but perhaps my children will. They'll know it, at least, when it appears: that the earth can stretch smooth and unbroken like grace, and they'll know as they know my voice that they were meant to have their share.
Lorene CaryI have a black belt in chutzpah. I was born with it. Some people, like some of the women I know, have a black belt in spending. They were born with that. But what they gave me was a black belt in chutzpah.
Charlie MungerIn discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.
Audre LordeAs I took another breath, I saw the three stars again. They were not calling to me; they were letting me go, leaving me to the black universe I had wandered for so many lifetimes. I drifted into the black, and it got brighter and brighter. It wasn't black at all - it was blue. Warm, vibrant, brilliant blue...I floated into it with no fear at all.
Stephenie MeyerBlack is the most slimming of all Colors. It is the most flattering. You can wear black at any Time. You can wear it at any age. You can wear it for almost any occasion. I could write a book about black.
Christian DiorBlack holes provide theoreticians with an important theoretical laboratory to test ideas. Conditions within a black hole are so extreme, that by analyzing aspects of black holes we see space and time in an exotic environment, one that has shed important, and sometimes perplexing, new light on their fundamental nature.
Brian GreeneBut George Lucas is carrying about Black actors, about Black men, about Black history, which really incorporates and tells all of history. You can't take one race out without eliminating every other race if you're going to tell the story of the human race.
Terrence HowardIncreasingly independent black economic, cultural and political power gave Blacks more freedom to do what came natural to them. Divorced from White influence and culture, they reverted quickly to their genotype - increasingly typical of black societies around the world. Males exhibited exaggerated sexual aggression and promiscuity that led to the dissolution of the Black nuclear family in America. Females reverted to the age-old African model of maternal provisioning of children.
David DukeI'm a black woman every day, and I'm not confused about that. I'm not worried about that. I don't need to have a discussion with you about how I feel as a black woman, because I don't feel disempowered as a black woman.
Shonda RhimesI love Obama, and I love the fact that it's a black president of the United States of America, but he's not the first black president. Robert Mugabe is a black president ,too, so let's not get to talking about precedents being set.
Lupe FiascoJeremiah Wright is one of the greatest prophetic preachers that black America has produced. What I find striking is that many white brothers and sisters miss the fact that there would be no black church if the white church wasn't political and racist in refusing to worship with us.
Michael Eric DysonPeople sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it,but this is not true.I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.
Franz KlineUp until the middle to late '60s, it was a choice to film in black-and-white or color. But then television became so vital to a film's finance, and television won't show black-and-white. So that killed it off, really.
John BoormanBlack Friday, in reality, is a symptom of the plight that 30 years of Reaganomics has brought to working people in America. Right along with the frenzied rise of shoppers willing to fight each other at retail outlets across America, we've been steadily, for the last 30 years, watching the destruction of organized labor ... of decent pay and wages and conditions for working people. ... We have Black Friday today because the wealthy elite have strangled their workers for 32 years, ever since Ronald Reagan's election.
Thom Hartmann... not all black women have silently acquiesced in sexism and misogyny within the African-American community. Indeed, many writers, activists, and other women have voiced their opposition and paid the price: they have been ostracized and branded as either man- haters or pawns of white feminists, two of the more predictable modes of disciplining and discrediting black feminists.
Kimberle Williams CrenshawWe jumped into the protest of Vietnam before the Black Panther Party ever started, before the Black Panther Party was even thought of. In fact, it was late 1965 and 1966 that the anti-Vietnam War, anti-draft to the Vietnam War protest started at University of California, Berkeley.
Bobby SealeShe was wearing a purple T-shirt, with a skinny black dress over it that made you remember how much of a girl she was, and trashed black boots that made you forget.
Kami GarciaWhen I was a child, I was one of the kids who wore black all the time, and when the kids asked me why I wore black, I said things like, 'I'm mourning the death of modern society.' I mean, I was a riot.
Maggie StiefvaterNormally Connor would walk away from a conversation like this. His life is about tangibles: things you can see, hear and touch. God, souls, and all that has always been like a secret in a black box he couldn't see into, so it was easier just to leave it alone. Only now, he's inside the black box.
Neal ShustermanO.J. Simpson existed in a bubble. So when Harry Edwards approached him about being involved in the Olympic Project for Human Rights, O.J.'s response was, famously, "I'm not black - I'm O.J." O.J. had ambitions to be famous, rich and liked by everyone, and I think he understood that being political and militant as a black athlete was not a way to engender universal love.
Ezra EdelmanThere is a class system in acting just like in anything else. Black females fall in a category below black male actors.
Debra WilsonNow, the black man here was so-called free by [Abe] Lincoln 100 years ago. The black man in America has an - has a purchasing power of 20 billion dollars. Now, and he's educated.
Malcolm XBlack scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campusโand at the very same timeโthat state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.
Rebecca SklootI am an American. Black. Conservative. I don't use African-American, because I'm American, I'm black and I'm conservative. I don't like people trying to label me. African- American is socially acceptable for some people, but I am not some people.
Herman CainDonald Trump has not held an event in the black community. He has not gone to a black church, as Hillary Clinton has done.
Donna BrazileAt first we raced through space, like shadows and light; her rants, my raves; her dark hair, my blonde; black dresses, white. She's a purple-black African-violet-dark butterfly and I a white moth. We were two wild ponies, Dawn and Midnight, the wind electrifying our manes and our hooves quaking the city; we were photo negatives of each other, together making the perfect image of a girl.
Francesca Lia BlockMarcus Garvey was one of the first advocates of Black Power, and is still today the greatest spokesman ever to have been produced by the movement of Black Consciousness...He spoke to all Africans on the earth, whether they lived in Africa, South America, the West Indies or North America, and he made Blacks aware of their strength when united.
Walter Rodney