Black Experience Quotes

#1. In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.

Eric Foner

#2. 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

#3. Most writers stick to what they know. The black experience is our experience, so it's not that challenging for us. That's why sometimes you'll see writers that start off telling black stories, but later branch out into other material. People say they "sell out." No, they evolve as writers.

Lena Waithe

#4. 'Empire' deals with the black experience, the human experience, sibling rivalry, what it feels like to be ignored or doted upon by a parent, illness, death. There are so many things that I think the audience can identify with.

Grace Gealey

#5. Teaching Black Studies, I find that students are quick to label a black person who has grown up in a predominantly white setting and attended similar schools as "not black enough." ... Our concept of black experience has been too narrow and constricting.

Bell Hooks

#6. Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.

August Wilson

#7. Somebody once told me, black people, in and of themselves, are cosmopolitan. There's cosmopolitanism within the black experience. There's an incredible amount.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#8. And realizing there is no such thing as the Black experience. Time and events allow for change on both sides.

Alice Childress

#9. In the sense that I also try to reflect the fullness of the black experience, I'm very much a jazz poet.

Jayne Cortez

#10. I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher's well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did.

Henry Rollins

#11. I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition
about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.

Maya Angelou

#12. When I learned about the gray existing between the black and white of absolute terms, I began to experience more peace. The more I expanded my gray areas (more than 50 shades), the more peace I experienced in my life.

David W. Earle

#13. Because she knew from experience that what came next was something straight out of a Pitbull featuring Ke$ha song. She was going down. Although, as far as she could figure, no one was yelling, "Timber!

Julie Ann Walker

#14. When something bad happens to us, especially when we are young, our brains will sometimes protect us from it until we are strong enough to deal with the issue. It's not uncommon for people to completely black out an experience for years and revisit it only when they feel safe enough to face it.

Gwen Hayes

#15. Nothing is more powerful than the black church experience. A good choir and a good sermon in the black church, it's pretty hard not to be move and be transported.

Barack Obama

#16. I sought my father in the world of the black musician, because it contained wisdom, experience, sadness and loneliness. I was not ever interested in the music of boys. From my youngest years, I was interested in the music of men.

Eric Clapton

#17. Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.

Peter Schjeldahl

#18. I knew from experience at the Negro Ensemble Company that it wasn't until there was a place controlled by black artists ... that Pulitzer Prize-winning work like 'Ceremonies in Dark Old Men' and 'A Soldier's Play' came to fruition.

Michael Schultz

#19. No female - young, old, black or white - could ever play the knight-on-charger with meager experience. If she presented herself as the human embodiment of national unity and world peace, everyone would have fallen down laughing.

Froma Harrop

#20. Black women, whose experience is unique, are seldom recognized as a particular social-cultural entity and are seldom thought to be important enough for serious scholarly consideration.

Barbara Smith

#21. I decided blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I had faced, so I decided to open a flying school and teach other black women to fly.

Bessie Coleman

#22. The divorced person is like a man with a black patch over one eye: he looks rather dashing but the fact is that he has been through a maiming experience.

Jo Coudert

#23. I'm speaking from personal experience when I say of any black man who conks today, or any white-wigged black woman, that if they gave the brains in their heads just half as much attention as they do their hair, they would be a thousand times better off.

Malcolm X

#24. They had this movie called Juno about a teenage girl who gets pregnant and it's nominated for an Oscar. That's an unusual experience for me, 'cause when a black girl gets pregnant it ain't no Oscar. It's social work and a box of condoms is what that is.

D. L. Hughley

#25. I like the idea of people coming to opera for the first time and finding it an enjoyable experience. I don't like the fact that opera is seen as elitist and all black ties and that stuff.

Rory Bremner

#26. The path to mastery involves being a white-belter till it becomes black from use.

Malti Bhojwani

#27. We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut know that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience.

Max Black

#28. I once had an extraordinary experience with former prime minister Ted Heath. Both of his eyes, including the whites, turned jet black, and I seemed to be looking into two black holes.

David Icke

#29. The very first video experience I had was in high school. They brought a black-and-white closed-circuit surveillance camera into the classroom. I will never forget, as a kid, looking at that image.

Bill Viola

#30. My worst hair experience was when I was trying to relax my hair and my grandmother did it. It went all straight and I looked like a black Bee Gee.

Jamie Foxx

#31. Sam, that's a great concept. And maybe you believe it. But I'm black and I'm a lesbian, so let me tell you: From what I know? Personal experience? There are always lines.

Michael Grant

#32. It's a strange experience, dying. People talk about how it creeps over you like a warm blanket. That's not true. It starts out warm, but then it hits you like a bucket of icy water after stepping out of a sweat lodge. Then it's all black like a void. I would know. I died and lived to tell about it.

Morgan Chalfant

#33. A silly society is a youth-obsessed society: To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of grey 'hairs and no-hairs' to 'black hairs' the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S.

Ilana Mercer

#34. I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.

Henry Louis Gates

#35. I feel like my life experience is that of an outsider. Let me explain: my parents are from Panama, and they moved to the United States the year after I was born. They moved into an all-white neighborhood, where the previous black family had a cross burned on their lawn.

J. August Richards

#36. Let's say black, the whole black religious experience, here, is very impressive to me, because when I first arrived I realized that people carry their faith with so much pride.

Boris Kodjoe

#37. In my experience I haven't met too many uptight black people. I'm sure they're out there. Like I'm some big authority and I've lived in the inner city and ghetto.

Paul Reubens

#38. Having a white parent undoubtedly makes for a different childhood experience than having two black parents.

Melissa Harris-Perry

#39. My experience I consider an accident in the Hollywood system. I don't believe it should be a reference for a black film maker, or an example for any young film maker, because it's purely luck.

Euzhan Palcy

#40. A lot of great art comes from the Afro-American male experience. Black men are geniuses, and many times their desperation, their position as being pariahs, leads them to great originality.

Ishmael Reed

#41. A poor white woman from the South is different than a poor black woman from the South, and has a completely different experience.

Bryan Fuller

#42. I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.

Octavia Butler

#43. It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.

Henry Louis Gates

#44. We are as tired of each other's company as we are of the cold monotony of the black night and of the unpalatable sameness of our food. Physically, mentally, and perhaps morally, then, we are depressed, and from my past experience... I know that this depression will increase.

Jenny Offill

#45. I start from experience and read ... always between polarities - loud and not-loud, young and old, spring and winter. If I can make black and white behave together instead of shooting at each other only, I feel proud.

Josef Albers

#46. My experience with journalists authorize me to record that a very large number of them are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually dishonest, and inadequately supervised.... They have huge power, and many of them are extremely reckless.

Conrad Black

#47. I can tell you from personal experience it gets a little tiring having to make the rounds on cable shows to explain 'what's up with black folks.'

John Ridley

#48. Everything had come into sharp focus: his smooth words, his black, glinting eyes, his broad experience with lies, seduction, women. I'd fallen in love with the devil.

Becca Fitzpatrick

#49. Six is the hardest number for me to experience, the smallest. It's the absence of something - it's cold, dark, almost like a black hole. If someone tells me they are depressed, I might imagine myself in the hole of a six to help me empathise.

Daniel Tammet

#50. Their analysis clearly revealed the existence of a color line that effectively blocked black occupational, residential, and social mobility. They demonstrated that any assumption about urban blacks duplicating the immigrant experience had to confront the issue of race.

William Julius Wilson

#51. No characters in 'Stay Close,' including the leads, are black and white. I want them to be grey. I think that makes for a much more interesting reading experience, something that will stay with you a little bit longer.

Harlan Coben

#52. am not a well-schooled woman. Instead, I have learned my lessons from experience, mistakes, and the heat of battle. If ever there was a shining alumnus from the school of hard knocks, it is I. My diploma can be found, printed in black and blue, at points of varying interest from head to toe.

Chris Kreski

#53. Law enforcement's biased view of the Irish lives on in the nickname we still use for the vehicles we use to transport groups of prisoners. It is, after all, the 'paddy wagon.' The Irish had tough times, but little compares to the experience on our soil of black Americans.

James Comey

#54. I'm a woman of color. I've lived in black neighborhoods all of my life, and most of the time I get hit on in my neighborhood - and mostly by black men. And so I wanted to have my specific experience and my perspective on street harassment out there.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

#55. The coolest thing for me is the experience of floating and not feeling my weight. And hanging by a window just after sunset and watching the stars in the big black dome of the sky as the earth moves underneath.

Kalpana Chawla

#56. I thought I'd be living a much more bohemian life and be very poor. I never thought I'd do comedy or be married living in the suburbs. Every time I try to plan my life out it just doesn't come to pass, and I think that's a great experience.

Michael Ian Black

#57. A rather honored guest of the Cuban government, so I wouldn't experience the problems. I think it would take a black Cuban to really articulate this because I'm being treated in a very generous way.

Huey Newton

#58. Watching television in those days was not the same experience as it is today. After years of listening to radio, we found the black-and-white images mesmerizing.

Annette Funicello

#59. Being the only non-Black was a unique experience. After a few weeks, you're not aware of skin color differences. You see the color; you're not blind, but it doesn't matter. You see the human being first.

Ricardo Montalban

#60. By figuring out how the experience can help you move forward. That's the point of why it happened to you in the first place. There's something you're suppose to get from the moment that'll get you closer to your mission if you can see it. Most people can't.

Daniel Black

#61. It is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#62. In interviews with dozens of black advisers, friends, donors and allies, few said they had ever heard Mr. Obama muse on the experience of being the first black president of the United States, a role in which every day he renders what was once extraordinary almost ordinary.

Jodi Kantor

#63. If you're doing something on an interesting scale that involves an entire universe of characters, one way to unite them is to have them all undergo a common experience, and there is something at Christmas that unites everybody. It already sets a stage within the stage.

Shane Black

#64. In recent years it has become popular for some retailers to begin their Black Friday sales on Thursday night. Do not support this inane trend. If you feel like you want to replicate the experience, blindfold yourself, tape $150 to your forehead and roll yourself down a hill in a shopping cart.

Jason Gay

#65. I write for myself, and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there.

August Wilson

#66. Now, most of the time you couldn't be too sure of the quality of the drug. Although, in my experience the stuff was always of a very high quality, because back then we didn't have business majors peddling lower-quality stuff in an effort to increase profits.

Lewis Black

#67. I approximated the Black Friday experience at home by hurling myself into a wall a number of times and then ordering online.

Kumail Nanjiani

#68. To her the world really wasn't just black and white, its shades were in varying shades of gray. Circumstance and experience shaped a person from the moment they were born. Everyone was a complex mix of bad and good. "Is

J.M. Dabney

#69. In my experience, as a young black artist, you have to fulfill an archetype, or be a token - and I was unwilling to do that.

Solange Knowles