Top 80 Black Folks Quotes
#1. Just because a black man is running the RNC doesn't mean black folks are going to, 'Oh, OK, I will be a Republican.' Just as with the election of President Obama. All the problems and concerns that are very important to African Americans don't get solved overnight.
Michael Steele
#2. White people made up the n-word, they knew about racial jokes before anybody, and in their old movies and old cartoons they made fun of everybody, especially black folks. Racial jokes were not new to them.
Paul Mooney
#3. I was very aware that the army was here to kill something hiding out (and I think the other black folks felt this as well) not only on the mountain, but inside my heart as well.
Terry Bisson
#4. the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor. Immigrants
W.E.B. Du Bois
#5. A lot of times black folks look for love in all the wrong places. You're always looking for somebody to love you, be accepted, and there's the insecurities that are even transmitted through rap. Everyone is trying to aim to please too much.
Chuck D
#6. We need to take responsibility and educate people. That's why black folks don't like me. I always say it's our responsibility to make safe neighborhoods. It's our job to get them cleaned up.
Charles Evers
#7. As black folks we're always sensitive. As a black person it's always racial.
Jamie Foxx
#8. In a broader sense, much of this story about the expansion of slavery and how it shaped the lives of black folks and the wider world is driven by the white men who tried to impose their codes on everything around them.
Edward E. Baptist
#9. The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance.
Bell Hooks
#10. The Republicans don't need black folks to vote Republican, they just need them to not vote.
Melissa Harris-Perry
#11. Anybody who runs for president in this country and comes out as strong as the Democrats were about helping the poor folks and black folks is not going to win.
Charles Evers
#12. It's fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility - this too is part of the work, is indeed central to [my photographs] ... This invisibility - this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time - is the greatest source of my longing.
Carrie Mae Weems
#13. Black folks never bungie jump. That's too much like lynching for us. I'm gonna let you tie a rope around me and push me off a bridge? You must be out your damn mind.
D. L. Hughley
#14. Black folks are often individually regarded as the authority on every facet of black culture and the people who create it, but it's exhausting for most black people to constantly be relied upon as the go-to official spokesnegro.
Justin Simien
#15. Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.
Dick Gregory
#16. Thank God for Jerry Springer's show. I thought only black folks were that screwed up until I watched Jerry Springer.
Charles Barkley
#17. America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Pat Buchanan
#18. Black folks are judged by quantity, not quality. It's a decimal point or figure. How different is that from slavery? There's no moral code, it's just about successful business for America.
Chuck D
#19. In his book The Soul of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois writes about always feeling his twoness
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; to warring ideals in one dark body.
Ron Suskind
#20. In life, you learned that not all white people are racist, not all black folks are criminals, let's admit it and love one another..
Werley Nortreus
#21. White folks needs what black folks got just as much as black folks needs what white folks got, and we's all got to stay here mongst each other and git along, that's what.
Margaret Walker
#22. Who we are as African-Americans, as black folks in the diaspora, our cultural destiny, has been shaped by both the enslaved and the free.
Bell Hooks
#23. For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place ... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.
Bell Hooks
#24. Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.
Dick Gregory
#25. As a child, however, I knew so many African Americans working in science, math, and engineering that I thought that's just what black folks did. My
Margot Lee Shetterly
#26. There are black men who are madly in love with white women. God bless them, if that's what works for them. I just hope that we can strike a balance that portrays black folks and the black family in a light that's not extreme. Those are the types of characters that I find myself attracted to.
Nia Long
#27. It's just what they are - they're jokes ... most jokes are about Jewish people, rednecks, black folks ... I can't determine what offends another person.
Paula Deen
#28. [ ... ] the only folks who kill black folks any more are black folks. [ ... ] black folks kill more black folks than the KKK ever did.
Michael Nutter
#29. 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
#30. What happens to Black Folks today, happens to White Folks tomorrow.
Dick Gregory
#31. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#32. Liberalism and their ideas have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did, now that's a fact.
E.W. Jackson
#33. Bill Clinton is a liar, a perverted kind of a guy anyway, and he is always stroking black folks rather than telling them the truth.
Tucker Carlson
#34. I don't want people to go to a film of mine because they feel guilty, like, 'I have to support it because there's black folks in there.' I want them to go because it's a good movie.
Gina Prince-Bythewood
#35. The outcome of the Clarence Thomas hearings and his subsequent appointment to the Supreme Court shows how misguided, narrow notions of racial solidarity that suppress dissent and critique can lead black folks to support individuals who will not protect their rights.
Bell Hooks
#36. in fact that's what I liked about black folks all my life: They never judged me. My black friends never asked me how much money I made, or what school my children went to, or anything like that. They just said, "Come as you are." Blacks have always been peaceful and trusting.
James McBride
#37. For black folks, the Confederate flag represents the same thing that the Nazi flag represents to the Jews. There is absolutely no difference when we look at it. Now, white folks try to explain it away like, 'Oh, it's OK.' But when you're black, it is not OK. It represents oppression and murder.
Ken Page
#38. That huge majority of black folks who identify as Christian or as believers in other religious faiths (Islam, Buddhism, Yoruba, and so on) need to return to sacred writings about love and embrace these as guides showing us the way to lead our lives.
Bell Hooks
#39. America's put American Black Folks in such a bad position, empty plates and glasses now get us full.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#40. To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.
Bell Hooks
#41. Keep on complaining about slavery and that was over 40 to 50 years ago. You know, black folks need to move on.
Ludacris
#42. I never thought I'd see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so, than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we was in Mississippi.
Dick Gregory
#43. Why are black folks singing Amazing Grace which is a song about a white slaver's conversion?
Dick Gregory
#44. Black folks don't have a chance, so they are in the hood, dealing drugs, in a shoot-out. They do it again and one more time they are out.
Snoop Dogg
#45. You are chicken for sure. Got a whole yellow trickle moving the wrong direction down these parts, and a trickle of black folks going the other way. Black and yellow, like a bumblebee.
Kathy Hepinstall
#46. I voted for Barack because he was black. 'Cuz that's why other folks vote for other people - because they look like them ... That's American politics, pure and simple.
Samuel L. Jackson
#47. I'll tell you how I'd like to be remembered: As a black man who won the heavyweight title - Who has humorous and who never looked down on those who looked up to him - A man who stood for freedom, justice and equality - And I wouldn't even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.
Muhammad Ali
#48. We do wish they'd have the same fervor and monetary backing for, say, a group of black legal gun carriers in Ferguson, Missouri, as they do white folks.
Trae Crowder
#49. In reality punk people are usually the gentlest, kindest folks you'll ever know. They're like hippies, only they wear way more black.
Kate Rockland
#51. I think that I don't panic as much as the folks on the left or the right do. I don't have that sense of panic.
Lewis Black
#52. Some men will not shave on Sunday, and yet they spend all the week in shaving their fellow-men; and many folks think it very wicked to black their boots on Sunday morning, yet they do not hesitate to black their neighbor's reputation on week-days.
Henry Ward Beecher
#53. I said, 'Oh, I know. If the white folks is in Heaven too, then the black angels were in the kitchen, preparing the milk and honey.'
Muhammad Ali
#54. Seeing a black transgender woman embracing and loving everything about herself might be inspiring to some other folks.
Laverne Cox
#55. I used to believe in em (lines). I don't anymore. They in our heads. Lines between black and white ain't there neither. Some folks just made those up, long time ago. And that go for the white trash and the so-ciety ladies too.
Kathryn Stockett
#56. It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.
James McBride
#57. Trouble comes looking for you. Lots of times I just stay in the house and enjoy my family. I try to be a father to my child, I'll stay out of trouble if I can, because I have lots to do. Other folks have different hardships. It's hard for a black man to raise a family.
Snoop Dogg
#58. In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.
Benjamin E. Mays
#59. Time will tell ... whether folks want to point and stare at the black woman filmmaker who made a certain kind of film, and pat her on the back, or if they want to actually roll up the sleeves and do a little bit of work so that there can be more of me coming through.
Ava DuVernay
#60. But despite the scarcity of confrontation with whites in our neighborhood, race and racism permeated every aspect of our lives. Our parents taught us that in order to succeed, we 'had to be twice as good as white folks.' We were constantly being prepared to enter a world dominated by whites.
Junius Williams
#61. The TV shouted an old black-and-white film he didn't recognize, wheelchairs facing it like church pews.
Sere Prince Halverson
#62. That's not to say that some of the new media is not advantageous. You can reach lots of folks with what Black Lives Matter is doing, mobilizing people. God bless them.
Marian Wright Edelman
#63. A conquering force sustained the old folks and now centers us. Forming a collective of comeback saints, let us rally behind them and move forward. We're called to a new awakening and application of what we've learned from those who've looked over Jordan.
Deborah L. Parker
#64. 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
#65. Words have power. And I may be privileged and have a higher IQ than any of our former teachers, but when people look at me? They see a black, male teenager. And there is nothing quite as frightening to some folks as an angry young black man.
Michelle Hodkin
#66. I know my destiny. I was born into animosity, bigotry and hatred. We had water for white folks, and water for coloured folks. White lines, black lines. I came from Beaufort in South Carolina, and it was tougher than Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
Joe Frazier
#67. Life was hard. Life was good. Most folks think this a contradiction, but I have learned that the hardest, most difficult times of my life caused the most growth in my character.
Chuck Black
#68. The soul is part of the body. The mind is part of the body. When folks do physical violence to black people, to black bodies in this country, the soul as we construe it is damaged, too - the mind is damaged, too.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#69. As black people, we want our story to be this constant ascendance from slavery. But it's not like that. You push and it goes up. Then there's a backlash, and if folks stop pushing, it goes down. Let's face it, it's a lot more complicated.
Stanley Nelson Jr.
#70. 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
#71. It's a privilege to pay taxes. Yeah! It's not a political question, folks. We have to pay for stuff.
Lewis Black
#72. We're told that independent film lovers ... folks that are used to watching art house films, won't come out and see a film with black people in it - I've been told that in rooms, big rooms, studio rooms, and I know that's not true.
Ava DuVernay
#73. The old folks say there is only black and white. That may do for their tidy lives, but it doesn't apply to all of us. We, Supergirls for real and the wretched creature at my feet, live in the gray and the mist. We may never see the stars, but we believe in the dream of them.
Mav Skye
#74. There's no doubt that there's some folks who just really dislike me because they don't like the idea of a black president.
Barack Obama
#75. We look at young black kids with a scowl on their face, walking a certain way down the block with their sweatpants dangling, however, with their hoodies on. And folks think that this is a show of power or a show of force. But I know, because I've been among those kids, it ultimately is fear.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#76. In this shifting landscape, we may tend to forget "what the old folks say." Most of us probably now realize that our ancestors did indeed have it right! Their common-sense ways allowed them to get through the worst of conditions throughout history and still we thrive from their bold undertakings.
Deborah L. Parker
#77. White folks, no matter how well-meaning or open-minded, have no true idea what it's like to be black in America. That's not a slam against white people or an accusation of latent bigotry. But the fact is that we all live in an Anglo-dominated society.
John Ridley
#78. Listen, we've got one little ol' black president, and white folks are upset, but they've had 43.
Paul Mooney
#79. There was a certain feeling I developed as a young person for black people. Somehow they were able to get pleasure out of things that I couldn't see them enjoying. I heard them sing a lot, and I didn't hear white folks going down the cotton rows singing that much.
Sam Phillips
#80. While it has become "cool" for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.
Bell Hooks
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