Top 100 Black America Quotes
#1. Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal.
Bell Hooks
#2. I cannot imagine where we would have been without BET. Many like me who operate in black America can only get our balanced story told nationally on BET talk shows.
Al Sharpton
#3. I try to speak my points of view about black America, and how I feel about black men and the role that black men should play in their lives with their children and in their lives with their women.
Will Smith
#4. The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.
James McBride
#5. When is black America going to forgive white America for slavery?
Mark Steyn
#6. King never confined himself to being solely the leader of black America - even though the white press attempted to do so.
Cornel West
#7. There's a class divide in black America that doesn't seem to trouble black Americans so much, but whites use it and exploit it. The progress of a few is allowed to stand for the progress of everyone. We can't afford that kind of disaffection at the moment.
Darryl Pinckney
#8. If you really think back to the culture or just black America before rap music took off, New York could have been Paris.
Ice Cube
#9. Jeremiah 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 Dyson
#10. Let us build bridges, my friends, build bridges to human dignity across that gulf that separates black America from white America.
Richard M. Nixon
#11. It's not anything that is just perpetuated by White America or just perpetuated by Black America. It's just a cultural understanding that you're just not a part of the equation when it comes to sexuality and I think that people mistake your lack of opportunity with the level of your talent.
Viola Davis
#12. Except during outbreaks of vicious bigotry, it is difficult to persuade white America that the alienation of Black America is actual and ongoing, afflicting each generation through policy, custom, quack science, and if nothing else, the Look.
Theresa Perry
#13. We believe that when you make Black America better - you make all of America better.
Tavis Smiley
#14. Where is the raised voice of black America? Why are we mute?
Harry Belafonte
#15. The Black church is extremely important in Black America. I think most Americans themselves believe in a divine power, in a god, and I'm sure that that number increases with Black people.
Harry Lennix
#16. It is not the destiny of Black America to repeat white America's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.
Audre Lorde
#17. 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
#18. There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.
Cornel West
#19. We have seen an unprecedented gathering of the leaders of black America coming together to speak with one voice, ... The whole spectrum of black thought was represented on this stage ...
This tells us that a new day is dawning in America.
Louis Farrakhan
#20. Hip-hop is very diverse, but if you only focus on one aspect of it, then what you get is this image of Black America that is completely contrary to what actually goes on.
Prince
#21. Liberalism Has Nearly Destroyed Black America, And Now It's Time For Black America To Return The Favor
Elbert Guillory
#23. I tried to balance the sufferings of the miserable victim against the moral degradation of Memphis, and the truth flashed over me that in large measure the race question involves the saving of black America's body and white America's soul.
Philip Dray
#24. Black America knows better than anyone else the high price children pay for the sexual agendas of adults.
Maggie Gallagher
#25. In black America there's such a thing as passing, the black people who are light skinned and they will pass for white.
Juan Williams
#26. If I could offer a single prescription for the survival of America, and particularly black America, it would be to restore the family. And if you asked me how to do it, my answer - doubtlessly oversimplified - would be; save the boys.
William Raspberry
#27. Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?
June Jordan
#28. Martin Luther King was a misguided leader. He worked to be recognized as the leader of black America when what black America needs isn't a leader, it is education.
Jim Brown
#29. Most of black America is in housing projects, without jobs, living on welfare. And this is not the case in 'The Cosby Show,' because all the values in that household are strictly what I would call white American values.
August Wilson
#30. I am so used to having two faces. A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face.
Lee Daniels
#31. Black America Has Allowed Itself to Be Used by Race-Baiters and White Liberal Elitists
Amy Ridenour
#32. I thought our community should have a deep dialogue to make black America better. I believe if we make black America better, we make all of America better.
Tavis Smiley
#33. My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now. I didn't recognize the poetry in everyday language of black America. I thought I had to change it to create art.
August Wilson
#34. When black America is on the move, America is on the move.
Cornel West
#35. 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
#36. White America is tortured by black America's failure to thrive, and all that guilt and anxiety has only gotten worse as a substantial quota of white America loses its own footing in the middle class and plunges into the rough country of joblessness, hopelessness, and government dependency.
James Howard Kunstler
#37. There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.
Michael Eric Dyson
#38. Rosewood is what Americans did to Americans. We have to hold the mirror up ... and look at ourselves. Sometimes that's an ugly sight. And sometimes you have to go through that pain - both black America and white America - so we can finally find some racial harmony.
Ving Rhames
#39. I think there is unnecessary conflict right now between the vehemently religious and the LGBT community. The extremes of religion I think and the LGBT community have an issue and because a lot of black families in America are more religious, I think that is where the conflict comes into play.
John Amaechi
#40. Unfortunately there is a standard set for it that precedes hip-hop. It would be great if corporate America didn't do this, but there is a huge market for sex and violence and anti-Black representations in America and the world that doesn't begin or end with hip-hop.
Bakari Kitwana
#41. 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
#42. Bill Cosby is one of America's most successful black performers.
Renee Montagne
#43. in America the worst thing you could be was a black man. Worse than dead, you were a dead man walking.
Yaa Gyasi
#45. I didn't realize, when I decided to be a comic, that a black person had never been allowed to stand flat-footed in America and talk to white folks. It never happened before.
Dick Gregory
#46. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.
Emma Goldman
#47. 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
#49. Whatever else the election of Barack Obama represented - some have called it redemption, others have called it the triumph of style over substance - it was the ultimate victory for people who believe that black political gains are of utmost importance to black progress in America.
Jason L. Riley
#50. 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
#51. There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.
August Wilson
#52. As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future. But I have never, ever, in all my years seen a leader so committed to delivering that better future to America's children as Hillary Clinton.
Donna Brazile
#53. We should be proud that so many want to come to America, that it is still seen as the land of opportunity. Let's make it a land of legal work, not black-market jobs. Let's make it a land of work, not welfare. Our land should be one of assimilation, not hiding in the shadows.
Rand Paul
#54. I started a lecture series that was inspired by my reporting on race in America. The 'Black in America' series launched on CNN in 2007 as an opportunity to freshen the national conversation on race.
Soledad O'Brien
#55. But Jo wasn't angry. Not anymore. He couldn't really tell if what he had been before was angry. It was an emotion he had no use for, that accomplished nothing and meant even less than that. If anything, what Jo really felt was tired.
Yaa Gyasi
#56. I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.
Henry Miller
#57. It's a great day in America when white people, black people and Latinos can all come together and pick on another minority.
George Lopez
#58. These ballot initiatives remind us that America is the land where people are free to dream whatever they want, so long as that dream doesn't make Midwesterners feel icky!
Lewis Black
#59. It's a new world that's very, very difficult to make sense of. But we have a new hope. We have a new man. America has now elected its first openly black President.
Rory Bremner
#60. A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood.
Haile Gerima
#61. When it comes to idiots, America's got more than its fair share. If idiots were energy, it would be a source that would never run out.
Lewis Black
#62. The problem is, there is no geographical cure. No matter where we (Black American Folk) go, we are still too plugged into this place. Our cousins, grandmothers, aunts, nieces will be in this place. And the second we start looking at it as a "them" problem, we become another problem.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#63. As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s 'the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.'
David T. Hardy
#64. The danger to a black child in America is not a white police officer. The danger is another black.
Rudy Giuliani
#65. So if you're black or brown, you can make money in America, you can get rich in America ... but whatever you decide to do, it better be positive, 'cause if one person is harmed, you will be destroyed. You see Oprah, she just be giving away money. She's doing that to keep the Feds off her back.
Chris Rock
#66. I think that America certainly has racism, I think that any industrialized country does. But when you see how many million fans Barack Obama has who are not black, it would lead one to the conclusion that millions of Americans are in fact not burdened by the albatross of racism.
Henry Rollins
#67. All I did in Chicago was to exercise my legal right to speak on my own behalf and I was given four years in jail as a result. But I think the most serious injustice perpetrated by the court system in America is the inability of a black man to get a jury of his peers.
Bobby Seale
#68. When I was going to school, I just wanted to be like everybody else. I would pull at my hair to try and get it to lie straight. America was where I would consume and absorb black culture, buy Ultra Sheen and watch 'Soul Train,' but I still had that weird in-between thing.
Neneh Cherry
#69. As a black actor, you always have the feeling that there's not as much work out there as for a white counterpart, but is America after all; you have to play ball if you're going to play ball.
Dorian Missick
#70. Now look at the crowd. We've got everybody here tonight: Black, white, Asian, Latinos - and guess what? President Obama says we can all stay! God Bless America!
Pitbull
#72. One of the worst things that happened to black people in America historically is integration. People ask me why I say that and I tell them it's because we gave up all of our control.
David Banner
#73. America's most dangerous and threatening black man is the one who has been kept sealed up by the Northerner in the black ghettos - the Northern white power structure's system to keep talking democracy while keeping the black man out of sight somewhere, around the corner.
Malcolm X
#74. It is utterly exhausting being Black in America - physically, mentally, and emotionally. While many minority groups and women feel similar stress, there is no respite or escape from your badge of color.
Marian Wright Edelman
#75. In America now every romantic comedy is interpreted politically. I can remember when I was promoting Black Hawk Down we were all being asked what it said about September 11th. Well, it was shot before that happened, so, nothing.
Eric Bana
#76. I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us, I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision
Carl Sandburg
#77. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#78. If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?
David Horowitz
#79. People always say 'You do racial comedy.' And I don't, exactly. I do cultural comedy. Because race and culture are two different things. There's black people from America and then there's black people from Africa. Racially, they're the same; culturally, they're extremely different.
Russell Peters
#80. The enormous success of 2009's 'The Blind Side,' in which Sandra Bullock makes a black teenager one of the family, demonstrates that America isn't post-racial. It is thoroughly mired in race - the myths that surround it, the guilt it inspires, the discomfort it causes, the struggle to transcend it.
Wesley Morris
#81. It is frustrating having to walk through America having to bob and weave people's impressions of me because they see a tall, black guy walking down the street. That is frustrating.
Justin Simien
#82. Just by the nature of making the choice to be true to who I am, I'm political. Sometimes that's all you need to do: Show up and be black, gay and Christian in America and actually say it out loud. And refuse to let anything or anybody take that away from you.
Billy Porter
#83. Electing a black president was probably the only coup America could pull off.
Nick Nolte
#84. Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"
they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)
Cornel West
#85. Yes, I'm an extremist. The Black race here in North America is in extremely bad condition. You show me a Black man who isn't an extremist and I'll show you one who needs psychiatric attention.
Malcolm X
#86. They asked if I knew what 'conscientious objector' meant. I told them that when the white man asked me to go off somewhere and fight and maybe die to preserve the way the white man treated the black man in America, then my conscience made me object.
Malcolm X
#87. Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#88. You don't need someone destroying you when your own people are the worst messengers possible. And this is what black people in America have not come to grips with.
Geoffrey Canada
#89. In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.
Zephyr Teachout
#90. America don't have no future! America's going to be destroyed! Allah's going to divinely chastise America! Violence, crimes, earthquakes- there's gonna be all kinds of trouble. America's going to pay for all its lynchings and killings of slaves and what it's done to black people.
Muhammad Ali
#91. But the price of error is
higher for you than it is for
your countrymen, and so
that America might justify
itself, the story of a black
body's destruction must
always begin with his or
her error, real or imagined ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#92. In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.
Karl Marx
#93. How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage?
Barack Obama
#94. When you get to know a lot of people, you make a great discovery. You find that no one group has a monopoly on looks, brains, goodness or anything else. It takes all the people - black and white, Catholic, Jewish and Protestant, recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants - to make up America.
Judy Garland
#95. I do not admit ... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia ... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race ... has come in and taken its place.
Winston Churchill
#96. The whole future of America's black community is at risk. One out of every three young black men in Washington, D.C., is under one arm or the other of the criminal justice system. These are the continuing consequences of slavery.
Randall Robinson
#97. In the white newspapers, they use it against us. They make the Panthers look like we all just want to rip the throats out of some white folks for no good reason. We have good reasons, but we still don't want to do that.
Kekla Magoon
#98. In America, black urban teenagers have long been lacking in inclusion. In France, there is a comparable lack of inclusion among North Africans. In much of Europe, there has been little attempt to include the Roma.
Edmund Phelps
#99. And my point was one I think that you'd agree with, which is there's no room in America for a black racist, a Latino racist, or a white racist, or an Asian racist, or a Native American racist. Now, we're either color blind or we're not color blind.
Newt Gingrich
#100. In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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