Black Parents Quotes

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

Melissa Harris-Perry

#2. I'm glad to take on the role of a domestic because many of your black leaders, your educators, your professionals came from domestic parents who made sacrifices to see that their children didn't go through what they did.

Esther Rolle

#3. The outside world told black kids when I was growing up that we weren't worth anything. But our parents said it wasn't so, and our churches and our schoolteachers said it wasn't so. They believed in us, and we, therefore, believed in ourselves.

Marian Wright Edelman

#4. My parents are the last of the middle class. My father worked for the government designing sea mines. My mother was a substitute teacher. Together, they worked really only until they were sixty.

Lewis Black

#5. Do your parents know you're here?' asked the lady at social Services. 'No,' I said, 'but I want to know about children's homes.' I had to stand on my toes to see over the reception desk.

Constance Briscoe

#6. I feel no obligation to teach my readers anything, to impart any sort of wisdom, to teach any sort of lesson, to instill any sort of morality. All I'm trying to do is make them and their parents laugh.

Michael Ian Black

#7. My work ethic came from my parents and my fear of failure. I came from a small, predominantly black school and I didn't want to let them down.

Jerry Rice

#8. My parents also had a tough time recognizing me at first. because my eyes were black and swollen shut and I had two tubes coming out of my head.

Amy Rankin

#9. The colors black and white are my uniform, to honor the working class. People like my parents, who were janitors and had to wear a uniform every day. It keeps me grounded.

Janelle Monae

#10. My listening changed when I heard music from Stax, Atlantic, Motown because by that age I thought anything that my parents listened to must be square. So I had to find my own rock n' roll, as it were, and I found it in black soul music.

Robert Palmer

#11. I'm a Roman Catholic. Or was. I was brought up that way and used to say my prayers every night, but I don't pray to God any more. I might use the usual phrases I picked up from my parents, 'Oh, if God spares me next year ... ' or 'Please God ... ' but they're only phrases.

Cilla Black

#12. Bentley mounted Silverwood, look down at his parents, and launched the powerful steed into the kingdom ... a kingdom waiting for one young knight to discover the truth of a Stranger.

Chuck Black

#13. Black college-educated people got to where they are on the backs of domestic help, meaning their parents and grandparents. So people should not forget how they got to where they are.

Esther Rolle

#14. My parents had to go to Ohio to get married in 1965 because it was still illegal in Mississippi. My white father and black mother.

Natasha Trethewey

#15. We were like a white family from the 1920s or something. My parents had this bizarre, different way of looking at things from the people that surrounded us. I went to an all-Mexican grade school and an all-black high school, and not many people in those places liked the same stuff as me.

Jack White

#16. It's a lot easier being black than gay. At least if you're black you don't have to tell your parents.

Judy Carter

#17. There's something about a divorce in that even if your parents still love you, the fact that they can't live with each other makes you feel there's something wrong with you.

Jack Black

#18. Radar threw his books into his locker and shut it. Then the din of conversation around us quieted just a bit as he turned his eyes toward the heavens and shouted, IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD'S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.

John Green

#19. Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#20. The way I was brought up by my parents and guided through my football life by the influences of various managers means that in some ways I am black and white.

Stuart Pearce

#21. Even though I couldn't speak English, there were many times that my black-American parents could read my mind and I could read theirs.

Kola Boof

#22. My parents used to rent old movies - my whole childhood is in black and white - and it was my dream to make films.

Tom Rachman

#23. Whatever its origin, the Demon Hand is a scary thing to face. When you get in and out of bed today, be sure to run and jump onto the mattress, no matter what your parents say. No one wants to feel the furry touch of that black claw as it curls around your ankle and pulls you into the darkness ...

David Bowles

#24. It's been 50 years since I was on the roof of my parents' house shooting Hag in a Black Leather Jacket when I didn't even know there was such a thing as editing. I thought you just shot the film and showed it. That's exactly what I did. I'm not that different 50 years later.

John Waters

#25. Being gay is harder than being black. I didn't have to come out black. I didn't have to tell my parents about what its like to be black.

Wanda Sykes

#26. 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

#27. When I was a teenager, my parents made me take a part-time job at the local Black Eyed Pea, which was a home-cooked-food family restaurant.

Ashley Jones

#28. 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

#29. My parents pressed upon me that "In this world, you are a black woman," so I was political about my hair and would not straighten it.

Jami Floyd

#30. My parents were married for sixty-five years, and I was married for about ten minutes, my first year at Yale Drama School. Something, somehow, didn't get passed on to my generation.

Lewis Black

#31. There is no knowing how or why dread comes on a parent. Of course, many times apprehension arises when there is no reason for it at all. And it comes most often to the parents of only children, parents who have indulged in black dreams of loss.

John Steinbeck

#32. You can't write a children's book that takes more than five or six minutes to read, because it will drive the parents batty. It has to be compact. Nobody thinks about the parents when they write these stupid books. I could write longer children's books, but it would actually be bad if I did.

Michael Ian Black

#33. Liberals have been driven to the desperate expedient of attributing ... social pathology in today's ghettos to 'a legacy of slavery' even though black children grew up with two parents more often under slavery than today.

Thomas Sowell

#34. I remember going with my parents to weddings where the women would arrive covered in black veils, but underneath, they'd be wearing the most exquisite brightly colored Dolce & Gabbana suits. They were like peacocks showing off their tails.

Huma Abedin

#35. You know, growing up, I lived in a neighborhood in Long Island where there was basically one black family. And I remember hearing all the parents and the kids in the neighborhood say racist things about this family.

Lorraine Bracco

#36. But at the time I didn't know that it would take more to escape black-and-white thinking than just no longer attending your parents' church. The church had provided me a sorting system, which was now ingrained. It had containers into which every person and idea and event was to be placed.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

#37. I was raised in a very religious home with two parents who were deeply involved in the black church. When I was young, I went to a small black AME church in New Jersey.

Cory Booker

#38. I have always been a singer, a writer, and a musician, not as a prodigy or as in a trade handed to me by my parents, but because of an inner voice or maybe a command from beyond reality as it is usually defined.

Frank Black

#39. Someone asked us later, "Didn't you wonder why no one came across you sooner?" Did I wonder? When you see your parents zipped up in black body bags on the Jellicoe Road like they're some kind of garbage, don't you know? Wonder dies.

Melina Marchetta

#40. With theatre, we all agree to suspend our disbelief about so many things, but not about race. It's totally OK to have one actor playing five roles - people are willing to believe that. But they won't believe it if there's a black or an Asian kid who has white parents. What does that say about us?

David Henry Hwang

#41. The legacies that parents and church and teachers left to my generation of Black children were priceless but not material: a living faith reflected in daily service, the discipline of hard work and stick-to-itiveness, and a capacity to struggle in the face of adversity.

Marian Wright Edelman

#42. We were the only black family in my neighborhood for many years. Wherever we lived, we were often the only black family, and certainly the only Haitian family. But my parents were really great at providing a loving home where we could feel safe and secure.

Roxane Gay

#43. You know what they say: 'Once you go black, your parents don't talk to you anymore.

Amy Schumer

#44. Did you pray?" she asks.
"For the last time," I say, narrowing my kohl-lined black eyes at her, "I refuse to pray to my own parents. It's ridiculous.

Kiersten White

#45. Not until her parents came to visit did the McGraw clan, Caleb included, learn that Snow's father was half black, landing Snow squarely and immediately in the undesirable category.

Terri Osburn

#46. I never really had to put much thought into my race, and neither did anybody else. I knew I was black. I knew there was a history that accompanied my skin color, and my parents taught me to be proud of it. End of story.

Issa Rae

#47. My parents were vegetarians. I'd show up at school, this giant black kid, with none of the cool clothes and a tofu sandwich and celery sticks.

Aisha Tyler

#48. I was raised by a black maid by the name of Ida Young and I probably talked to her more than anybody, so whatever is nutty about me was nutty about her, too, I think because I saw a lot more of her than I did of my parents.

Kurt Vonnegut

#49. Whenever someone refers to me as someone "who happens to be black," I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.

Thomas Sowell

#50. No matter what, your parents are going to worry about you. I had a tour bus, and my mother still thought I was broke. Remember: It's your life, not theirs. Just because your parents sent you to college doesn't mean they bought the rest of your life.

Lewis Black

#51. I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

Jess Row

#52. My parents lived in a poor rural community on the Eastern Shore, and schools were still segregated. And I remember when lawyers came into our community to open up the public schools to black kids.

Bryan Stevenson

#53. My parents were very supportive of me and my artistic endeavours. My father and mother came to every school play I ever did.

Jack Black

#54. I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies.

Geraldo Rivera

#55. I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Summit, an upscale town in north Jersey. There was this tiny area of Summit where most of the black families lived. My parents and I lived in a duplex house on Williams Street.

Ice-T

#56. At my parents' house, I recently found a 1950 black-and-white snapshot of a chubby bespectacled warrior holding a three-and-a-half-foot freshly killed rattlesnake. The boy's smile is ecstatic.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#57. My story starts with my dad, a black boy born to a single mother in a small town in North Carolina. It starts with my parents meeting in Washington, D.C., in the '60s, at a time of incredible activism.

Cory Booker

#58. I can't talk about the education of black children if I ignored two of my nieces who were a couple of grade levels behind. I believe that charity begins at home, and I take seriously the role of a godfather to fill the gap when the parents aren't doing their job.

Roland Martin

#59. You look at my audience, and it proves what Congress thinks America is, is wrong. I get people across the political spectrum. Parents and kids come and they're all punked out, and there are these other guys in John Deere caps.

Lewis Black

#60. So when I got to be about 13 or 14, I started listening - even though my parents music was way cool - to contemporary hard rock at that time, which was Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Ted Nugent and all that, and that's just where I came from.

Slash