Top 100 Black In America Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Audiences want great story telling; it's why white people watch my show 'Black in America.' It's why black people watch 'Latina in America.' All of that is statistically shown and proven but it was because it was good story telling about people who were outsiders.
Soledad O'Brien
#4. 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
#5. We struck an unusual deal. I'll get to leave CNN with my catalog and documentaries. We were able to create a brand at CNN - 'Black in America' - that I now own. I can take that brand and extend it in any way I want.
Soledad O'Brien
#6. My mixed-race background made me a broad person, able to relate to different cultures. But any woman of colour, even a mixed colour, is seen as black in America. So that's how I regard myself.
Alicia Keys
#7. If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.
Henry Hampton
#9. At screenings for 'Black in America,' I've heard people say, 'Well you know, I never thought you were black until you did Katrina, and then I thought you were black.'
Soledad O'Brien
#10. Being called Black in America is the struggle to keep us moving and breathing over bloody water. Being a Nig**r or [Ni**a] without the context of history is like drowning in bloody water, dragging down those yet knowing to swim.
Chuck D
#11. I love being black in America, and especially being black in Hollywood.
Will Smith
#12. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn't matter when you're alone together because it's just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. in America the worst thing you could be was a black man. Worse than dead, you were a dead man walking.
Yaa Gyasi
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The danger to a black child in America is not a white police officer. The danger is another black.
Rudy Giuliani
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#44. If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?
David Horowitz
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage?
Barack Obama
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. The question of religion in black America is something filmmakers don't want to touch.
James McBride
#61. 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
#62. Racial oppression of black people in America has done what neither class oppression or sexual oppression, with all their perniciousness, has ever done: destroyed an entire people and their culture.
Eleanor Holmes Norton
#63. When I think of the trials and tribulations that black men go through in America and that black artists went through, I feel very privileged.
Ving Rhames
#64. 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
#65. I am proud and honored to be part of the America Supports You Freedom Walk to honor the victims of 9/11 and to support our men and women in uniform.
Clint Black
#66. The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
Karl Marx
#67. To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.
James A. Baldwin
#68. The roles that I feel I get, or handed to me, or whatever, are not that interesting. I don't think it's a problem that's specific to black women. I think it's a problem that's specific to movie-making in America.
Aunjanue Ellis
#69. ... as a reminder that a white man could still kill him for nothing.
Yaa Gyasi
#70. America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one's own sleep.
James A. Baldwin
#71. 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
#72. The Blues scene now is international. In the '50s it was purely something that you would hear in black clubs, played by black musicians, especially in America. But from the '60s onwards it changed.
Mick Taylor
#73. Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#74. No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa & America.
Thomas Jefferson
#75. In 1957, when I was in second grade, black children integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. We watched it on TV. All of us watched it. I don't mean Mama and Daddy and Rocky. I mean all the colored people in America watched it, together, with one set of eyes.
Henry Louis Gates
#76. If no other consideration had convinced me of the value of the Christian life, the Christ like work which the Church of all denominations in America has done during the last 35 years for the elevation of the black man would have made me a Christian.
Booker T. Washington
#77. Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.
Maya Angelou
#78. It's very hard to be black in this country and hate America. It's really hard to live like that. I would actually argue it's impossible to fully see yourself.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#79. I could never live with you; not 'cause I'm racist or nothing. It's just 'cause as a black man in America, I need to have someone I can come home and complain about white people to. And that just don't work with my white wife.
J. B. Smoove
#80. We were in the heart of the ghetto in Chicago during the Depression, and every block - it was probably the biggest black ghetto in America - every block also is the spawning ground practically for every gangster, black and white, in America too.
Quincy Jones
#81. The FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program would work hand-in-hand with police departments, literally planning attacks on Black Panther Party offices throughout the United States of America. They did this over a period of time.
Bobby Seale
#82. We [black actors] are more respected in Europe, because in Europe, I'm not a black actor - I'm an action star. In America, I'm a black actor.
Fred Williamson
#83. White-on-white crime is a devastation in America like so-called black-on-black crime. It's not black or white-on-white crime. It's proximity murder.
Michael Eric Dyson
#84. In 2013, 71 percent of black children in America were born to an unwed mother, as were 53 percent of Hispanic children and 36 percent of white children. Indeed, a single parent is the new norm.
Nicholas Kristof
#85. The way I was taught, being black was a plus, always. Being a human being, being in America, and being black, all three were the greatest things that could happen to you. The combination was unbeatable.
Leontyne Price
#86. Some said America took a step forward electing a black president. In light of the unconstitutiona l expansion of powers, lack of transparency and fueling the fires of unrest that clearly hasn't been the case. Vote based on merits, not to fill a racial quota.
Denzel Washington
#87. Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.
Henry Louis Gates
#88. What I'm asking is will watching The Discovery
Channel with my young black boy instead
of the news coverage of the riot funerals riot arrests
riot nothing changes riots be enough to keep him
from harm?
Jennifer Givhan
#89. America certainly has made extraordinary progress. The collective unconscious of the nation has certainly shifted as a result of the civil rights movement and the developments in the '70s and '80s. We have witnessed a great expansion of the black middle class.
Michael Eric Dyson
#90. A lot of wars are fought between black and whites daily in America.But if it's something I want to be with, the people who started it were black, I wouldn't not get in it.
Muhammad Ali
#91. I always knew I'd be a millionaire by age thirty-two. In fact, I am going to be the richest black woman in America.
Oprah Winfrey
#92. If you want to know who the oppressed minorities in America are, simply look at who gets their own shelf in the bookstore. A black shelf, a women's shelf, and a gay shelf.
Armistead Maupin
#93. Prejudice is not a symptom of stupidity. Nor is it a symptom of evil. It is merely a symptom of ignorance.
The Prophet Of Life
#94. Although black and white Americans live, work, and learn together now, there is still injustice in America.
Kathleen Sebelius
#95. 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
#97. Barack Obama will appeal to both black and white voters in America. White voters who'll think he's Tiger Woods.
Frankie Boyle
#98. This is a career about images. It's celluloid; they last for ever. I'm a black woman from America. My people were slaves in America, and even though we're free on paper and in law, I'm not going to allow you to enslave me on film, in celluloid, for all to see.
Angela Bassett
#99. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. I
Michelle Alexander
#100. There's a very big gulf between the black civil rights leadership in America and the black middle class in America. The black middle class are conservative. Many of those minorities can be persuaded to be members of the Republican Party.
Pete Du Pont
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