African America Quotes

#1. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?

Philip Dray

#2. 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,

Zola Budd

#3. Dear Police:
You can't protect me and be scared of me.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#4. I never said I wasn't Black ... I want to make that very clear. I said, I am not African-American. I never expected my personal beliefs and comments to spark such emotion in people. I think it is only positive when we can openly discuss race and being labeled in America.

Raven-Symone

#5. It's just cheaper to be White in America than it is to be Black, because of educational advances, because of the police incidents, because of the poverty we grow up in as African-Americans. So, it's just cheaper in this country if you're born a Caucasian than being born a Black person.

Warren Ballentine

#6. The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.

Nicholas Kristof

#7. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#8. I'm dying twice as fast
as any other American
between eighteen and thirty-five
This disturbs me,
but I try not to show it in public.

Essex Hemphill

#9. The media in America is not covering American AIDS very much. They're covering African AIDS as if somehow miraculously it's all stopped here. Well, it hasn't, and the one thing they're not saying about Africa is that all those people are going to die; there's no way these people can be saved - none.

Larry Kramer

#10. When it comes to cyber conflicts between, say, America and China or even a Middle Eastern nation, an African nation, a Latin American nation, a European nation, we have more to lose.

Edward Snowden

#11. Cumbia is a beautiful rhythm. It's a music that has indigenous, African and European components. It's played in all of America - from Argentina to the U.S. It has mutated and been nurtured by everyone who comes across it.

Juan Campodonico

#12. The reason I'm in San Diego is not because I want distance from South Africa but because I want proximity to the people I love. But I don't envy growing up in America. As ugly as aspects of it were, my biggest blessing was to be born a South African.

Athol Fugard

#13. In Obama's case, we've enabled affirmative action to find a home in the nation's highest office. There you have it. I said it and I stand by it. America fell for the gimmick candidate, disregarding every fact and warning sign in the rush to have 'the first African-American president.'

Allen West

#14. America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

Marco Rubio

#15. Anyone who watches a lot of television, or listens to pop music, is familiar with a certain vision of America. If not exactly colorblind, this America is one in which different races easily interact, in which a white person might have an Asian boss, Hispanic stepson, or African-American frenemy.

Wesley Morris

#16. The Afro-American experience is the only real culture that America has. Basically, every American tries to walk, talk, dress and behave like African Americans.

Hugh Masekela

#17. A lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there.

Wangechi Mutu

#18. It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#19. Passion without purpose is like a shot without a target.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

#20. 'The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears' is very much about America - it just happens to have African and Ethiopian characters, and in fact, it happens to have more characters who are not Ethiopian than who are.

Dinaw Mengestu

#21. My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.

Barack Obama

#22. Just like "All American" means "White," "All Lives" means "White.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#23. They made you an Amendment and convinced you it meant 'American.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#24. From the world wars of Europe to the jungles of the Far East, from the deserts of the Middle East to the African continent, and even here in our own hemisphere, our veterans have made the world a better place and America the great country we are today.

John Hoeven

#25. All people of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean, or in any part of the world are Africans and belong to the African nation.

Kwame Nkrumah

#26. What if I told you every single person in America - every single person on Earth - is African? With a small scrape of cells from the inside of anyone's cheek, the science of genetics can even prove it.

Spencer Wells

#27. They think America is like a major league in entertainment. For me personally being here for the past year-and-a-half, I know some of the arguments and discrepancies African American actors have with the opportunities here.

Aml Ameen

#28. The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience,

Henry Louis Gates

#29. America has been very open to immigrants in terms of laws, getting loans - it has been helping immigrants more than it's been helping African Americans in starting a small business. That's key, whether you're starting a restaurant or a laundromat.

Marcus Samuelsson

#30. A growing number of Muslims in America, more than 40 percent are African-American

Charles Bierbauer

#31. Before I started Coffee of Grace, I assumed all coffee came from Latin America or Indonesia. I wasn't familiar with African coffee.

Grace Hightower

#32. Ethiopia always has a special place in my imagination and the prospect of visiting Ethiopia attracted me more strongly than a trip to France, England, and America combined. I felt I would be visiting my own genesis, unearthing the roots of what made me an African.

Nelson Mandela

#33. Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.

Aberjhani

#34. [God brought African slaves to America] so that their descendants would know freedom.

Ezola B. Foster

#35. America's put American Black Folks in such a bad position, empty plates and glasses now get us full.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#36. The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#37. In America we saw more food than we had seen in all our lives and we were so happy we rummaged through the dustbins of our souls to retrieve the stained, broken pieces of God.

NoViolet Bulawayo

#38. I am an African-American in America. That will never change. But I don't have to be defined by that.

Robert Griffin III

#39. It's fair to say that white America wouldn't have elected an African-American president without the integrating effect of black music - from Louis Armstrong to hip-hop - and black drama and fiction, commercial as much as 'serious.'

Joe Haldeman

#40. In African American culture, class bias is the handmaiden of intraracial prejudice that privileges the near-white or light-complexioned person over the darker-hued.

Rita B. Dandridge

#41. The rise of African nations concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement gave black America a burst of pride over and above anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.

John Henrik Clarke

#42. I'm proud to be an American. I'm proud to be an African American in America. I've had some interesting experiences: some great, some not so great, but I love it here.

Wesley Snipes

#43. We are the in midst of a bipartisan moment as it relates to criminal justice reform and dealing with mass incarceration in America which disproportionately impacts the African-American community.

Hakeem Jeffries

#44. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#45. The music that I listen to the most is probably world music, whether it's from African or South America or all over.

St. Lucia

#46. The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.

Ishmael Reed

#47. Consider the statistics that African American Males are stopped by the police more often, convicted for crimes more often and draw prison more often and draw longer prison sentences more often than their white counterparts.

The Prophet Of Life

#48. Every African-American I know has two faces. There's the face that we have for ourselves and the face we put on for white America for the places we have to get to.

Lee Daniels

#49. My identity is not based on performance; it's based on something that's pre-determined by someone else, and I don't even understand what that is because I'm an African who came to America.

Toyin Odutola

#50. The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they're not gone.

Naomi Wolf

#51. This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America

Paul Robeson

#52. We examine and highlight the history of the African descendants in America, and know that each and every one of us has come this far because of our faith in this country.

Yvette Clarke

#53. America was magnificently characterized in November of 2008 when we elected, for the first time, an African-American President of the United States.

David Scott

#54. The author relates the progress of inoculation against smallpox in America with the interaction between an African slave named Onisimus whose homeland knew how to treat the malady and and leading clergyman Cotton Mather who was curious and open-minded enough to listen to him.

Robert J. Allison

#55. What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset.

Andrew Young

#56. They say African Americans. I say black people. I've only been to Africa once. I've been in America all my life!

Herman Cain

#57. Every day in America, African Americans are reminded of their race in ways large and small. Every day.

Jennifer Granholm

#58. This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.

William Labov

#59. America is ready to elect its first African American President, especially one with light-skin and and no Negro dialect.

Mitch McConnell

#60. Twenty-two million African-Americans - that's what we are - Africans who are in America.

Malcolm X

#61. My own personal theory is that all popular music, in whatever form it is, to me, it all comes from Africa. Whether it's filtered through America or whatever - African-American. But I still think there's something in that roots music that's very, very African, and I think that's what unites people.

Paul Weller

#62. 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.

Whoopi Goldberg

#63. If you see a group of people struggling over generations and you attribute those struggles to bad character, then you do not truly believe we are all created equally.

Jonathan R. Miller

#64. Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It's very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with.

Henry Louis Gates

#65. I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why'd she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn't she care about the others?
Today, I zoomed out and wondered why I'm still in America.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#66. These stark divides prompt a simple but fundamental question: why can't White Christian America understand how African Americans feel about the black men who have died at the hands of white police officers? To

Robert P. Jones

#67. I was adopted my black Americans, I feel that I'm a 'Hybrid'. When I'm around Africans'I suddenly feel very black American. And when I'm around black Americans'I feel very North African. North Africa and black America are both the creators of Kola Boof.

Kola Boof

#68. I loved 'Ghana Must Go' by Taiye Selasi. It's about a first-generation African family living in America that has to return home to Nigeria when their estranged father passes away.

Uzo Aduba

#69. When I think of my work, I'm aware that I'm American and African at all points and times. And without a doubt, my experience and understanding of America was shaped by having immigrant parents.

Dinaw Mengestu

#70. It's not Africa that is destroying the African rainforest, it's selling concessions to timber companies that are not African, they are from the developed world - Japan, America, Germany, Britain.

Jane Goodall

#71. African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll.

David Simon

#72. I am extremely ecstatic about the presidency of Barack Obama. I think he is paving the way for young African-American men like myself. I have very high expectations for Obama, and I am extremely hopeful that he will bring great lasting change not just to America, but to the entire world.

Texas Battle

#73. 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.

Malcolm X