Quotes About African American Culture

#1. I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody.

Spike Lee

#2. There's a thing called the 'One Drop' theory in African-American culture, which is if you have one drop of black blood in you, you're black.

Keegan-Michael Key

#3. When I got near teen age, I was so happy with my friends and the African-American culture that I couldn't imagine not being part of it.

Johnny Otis

#4. I try to find the core values that are so fundamental that they transcend ethnic identity. That doesn't mean I run from it. I embrace African-American culture and I love it and embrace it, but it is a part of a human identity. So I'm always trying to make a larger human statement.

Wynton Marsalis

#5. In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.

Moby

#6. To make an absolutely gross generalization, I think a lot of people feel like if you're mixed, more often than not you're quote unquote white. So if you're mixed, you embrace the mainstream culture more than the African-American culture.

Keegan-Michael Key

#7. In African American culture, class bias is the handmaiden of intraracial prejudice that privileges the near-white or light-complexioned person over the darker-hued.

Rita B. Dandridge

#8. People ask me if I miss the States. I miss African Americans. But not the U.S. government or all the things they put me through. I miss African American culture, our speech, dance and cooking.

Assata Shakur

#9. The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

Ishmael Reed

#10. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement.

Michael Eric Dyson

#11. Coming up in the African-American culture, we were taught that we belonged to the universe and society was wrong in the way it dealt with us. We had to learn to express and affirm values not from the winning position.

Bernice Johnson Reagon

#12. African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner

#13. It's depressing to see blacks wanting to dive into the mainstream of American commercial life. They come from a magnificent African culture based on aesthetics, and they all want to become fort builders like the vicious people who originally enslaved them.

George Carlin

#14. Jesse Jackson's living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture

Mark Steyn

#15. I wasn't doing much work when I was using and drinking. I have friends who did it (work), but I wasn't one of those people.

Rob Roberge

#16. The African-American community still needs to come together as one and stand up for rights of the people and of what's happening in their culture, their community.

Ziggy Marley

#17. And in man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe.

Isaac Asimov

#18. My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.

John Edgar Wideman

#19. People are surprised at how down-to-earth I am. I like to stay home on Friday nights and listen to 'The Art of Happiness' by the Dalai Lama.

Carmen Electra

#20. Everybody's a train wreck in their own very special way. But there's something wildly freeing about someone who's unapologetic, who knows they're a wreck and doesn't even try to hide it, just bulldozes through life.

Melissa McCarthy

#21. The real power of tribes has nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with people.

Seth Godin

#22. From politics and business to music and food to culture, African-Americans have helped to shape our state's colourful past and its future.

Mary Landrieu

#23. Love catches fire...

Julie Maroh

#24. I am the anti-trend guy? I don't believe in chasing trends. And before anyone shops, I believe you benefit from doing a closet inventory. Ask yourself what am I wearing, what am I not wearing, and you'll probably discover things you didn't even know you had.

Tim Gunn

#25. Culture is about humanizing people. You look at the African-American civil rights movement, you look at the LGBT rights movement - the culture changed before the politics did.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#26. Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.

Charles Simic

#27. Popular culture - above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R & B roots - did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader.

Camille Paglia

#28. If you have a dog, and you're a person whose moods are constantly changing, there's a moment when you look at the dog, and you feel bad for them because they're attached to you, and so it's funny for the dog to vocalize those things in some ways.

Eileen Myles

#29. American high school culture was impenetrable to me, and very cliquey: you had the Hispanics, the African Americans, the surfer guys and the goths and the immigrants. The jocks and the surfers got the girls. By the time I'd got to grips with it, I'd graduated.

Khaled Hosseini

#30. If comedy is about surprises, about tension, there's a lot of tension and surprise there, in the fact that people are expecting this to be natural.

Bo Burnham

#31. So now, when I look back, all I see is who we used to be and who we are now. And I wonder how anybody can recognize anyone at all.

Susan Pogorzelski

#32. Table talk and Lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; Lovers' Talk is clouds, Table Talk is smoke.
Les Miserables

Victor Hugo

#33. The book was thick and red. It was almost thicker than it was wide, a thickness that somehow enhanced its bookishness. It was - to me aged 12 - quite clearly more of a book than most, if not all, of the paperbacks untidily stacked on the shelves of my father's study.

Will Self

#34. It wasn't until I came to New York and started to see the African American community, but also the Ethiopian community here, and started to eat the food, started to understand the music. I said, you know, I got to go and understand the culture. So me and my sister went.

Marcus Samuelsson

#35. What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export.

David Simon

#36. I'm African-American by my culture, not by my color. Race does not exist.

Terry Crews

#37. The Afro-American experience is the only real culture that America has. Basically, every American tries to walk, talk, dress and behave like African Americans.

Hugh Masekela

#38. When their voices didn't reach my ears,
I rebelled against my own skin
too young to realize that without their
stories I would starve.

Kiana Davis

#39. Jamestown changed the world in many ways, but perhaps it shaped our nation most profoundly the day Africans arrived. I can't think of a more relevant place to talk about the issues facing our community today than the place where African culture became American culture.

Tavis Smiley

#40. The Arab representatives and their followers were not interested in the persecuted millions throughout the world; they were fixed on a political agenda that distracted the world from their own serious shortcomings in the human-rights department.

Jack Schwartz