Quotes About African American Identity

#1. My intention is not to repudiate an African American identity but perhaps to resist how labels take hold, or to make it as slow a process as possible. That's more my sense of it.

Mark McMorris

#2. 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

#3. If you have a past with which you feel dissatisfied, then forget it, now. Imagine a new story for your life and believe in it. Focus only on the moments when you achieved what you desired, and that strength will help you to get what you want.

Paulo Coelho

#4. A rich person who has no love in his heart is poorer than a poor person who has no money in his pocket.

Debasish Mridha

#5. She dragged me across the floor, stopping from time to time only to kick me. I didn't know our cows too could be so inhuman.

Samuel Beckett

#6. I'm trying to entice people, and sometimes my information is very hard hitting. So I've always wanted to have a soft approach.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

#7. To reaffirm the statement on the choosing of my identity, I come from two beautiful cultures which I have embraced, bridged, balanced, and identify with. I am proud to be who I am as a Dine' (Navajo) and Nahilii (African American) woman. Hozho', , & blessings

Radmilla Cody

#8. We praise heroes as though they are rare, and yet we are always ready to blame another man for lack of heroism.

Graham Greene

#9. There's nothing more useless than a mind filled with someone else's thoughts.

Laurie Gray

#10. Jobs had always been an extremely opinionated eater, with a tendency to instantly judge any food as either fantastic or terrible. He could taste two avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible.

Walter Isaacson

#11. 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

#12. Some things in life are certain; death, taxes, and that your family will piss you off.

Melanie Finn

#13. A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.

Peter Drucker

#14. Kat and I were in our 20s when we won in '88. Our personalities were already established. We were ready to move on to a life of professional skating.

Brian Boitano

#15. It may all end tomorrow, or it could go on forever (in which case I'm doomed).

Morrissey

#16. It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.

Clement Alexander Price

#17. There is something in the act of having tattoos done that I love. It can be quite addictive. I've got a few on my back because my friend is an artist, and a few on my arms. Every time I pass a tattoo parlour, I think, 'Maybe just a tiny one.'

Lena Headey

#18. We've gone through the names - Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that's an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?

Spike Lee

#19. The form of Christianity that developed in Europe and later spread to America and the rest of the world was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.

Will Durant

#20. If god is dead, who's going to fix this mess?

Satoshi Kon

#21. Chris Hedges said that Michael Jackson's memorial service was a variety show with a coffin, that MJ transformed himself through surgery and perhaps female hormones from a brown-skinned African American male to a chalk-faced androgynous ghoul with no clear sexual identity.

Chris Hedges

#22. I look white to a lot of people. And I'm not. I'm African-American. I'm mixed. I like to call myself Mulatto because that definition fits. So, you know, I've dealt with the conflict my whole life between how I look and my actual ethnic and racial identity.

Mat Johnson

#23. In that one glimpse of a better nature, born as it was in selfish thoughts, the rich man felt himself friendless, childless, and alone.

Charles Dickens

#24. I feel like because black Cuban artists don't have the kind of pressure to thematize race in the way that African-American artists do, there's more space for them to do their art without having to discuss it in terms of racial identity.

Rachael Price