Quotes About African American

#1. The simple truth is that balding African-American men look cool when they shave their heads, whereas balding white men look like giant thumbs.

Dave Barry

#2. I come from an interracial family: My father is from Nigeria, and so he is African-American, and my mother is American and white, so I rarely see skin color. It's never an issue for me.

Annie Ilonzeh

#3. While we dance in the streets and pat ourselves on the back for being a nation great enough to reach beyond racial divides to elect our first African-American president, let us not forget that we remain a nation still proudly practicing prejudice.

Harvey Fierstein

#4. As we women know, there are so many other hurdles that we have to cross that I would love it if we could stop having the race conversation so that we can get women further on. You know, a female president now that we have an African American president. Maybe we can get an Asian female, a gay person?

Octavia Spencer

#5. America is ready to elect its first African American President, especially one with light-skin and and no Negro dialect.

Mitch McConnell

#6. We still have too many Americans who give in to their fears of those who are different from them. Not so long ago, swastikas were painted on the doors of some African-American members of our Special Forces at Ft. Bragg. They are special forces. They do not deserve to have swastikas on their doors.

William J. Clinton

#7. I had this idea that I wanted to do this mixture of visions of African American women and visions of African American men. And call it 'The Men' and call it 'The Women' and show different faces of these two people.

Faith Ringgold

#8. I love "Phenomenal Woman." The experiences she had of being African American in the U.S. - that itself is a task. I appreciate the hardships Maya Angelou went through for our generation. I'm super influenced by the black people that paved the way for us.

Serena Williams

#9. Instead, as a consequence of racial gerrymandering, "elections nationwide have become more or less permanently structured to discourage politically adventuresome African American candidates who aspire to win political office in majority-white settings.

Jason L. Riley

#10. Barack Obama happens to be the first African-American, and so criticism of him is and always was gonna be racism, and therefore not permitted.

Rush Limbaugh

#11. can you be a daughter.
if you have no
mother language."
- african american iii

Nayyirah Waheed

#12. My father has passed away. He was African-American. My mother is white. So I was adopted by a couple that was of a similar dynamic as my biological parents.

Keegan-Michael Key

#13. This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.

William Labov

#14. Somehow, someway, for some people there's an automatic assumption that a mayor who is African-American or some other elected official has to support another African-American.

Michael Nutter

#15. In 2012 President Obama didn't go anywhere near African-American communities. Why? Because unemployment was so high there, he didn't want to address it.

Rudy Giuliani

#16. I'm less interested in how we label ourselves. I'm more interested in how we treat each other. And if we're treating each other right, then I can be African-American, I can be multi-racial, I can be you name it, what matters is, am I showing people respect, am I caring for one, for other people.

Barack Obama

#17. There are not many of us African American Sister Presidents, and those of us who are in this field do not have an easy time of it. Why the story goes that one Black woman college president died and went to hell, and it was two weeks before she realized that she wasn't still on the job.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#18. There clearly is a serious race problem in the country. Just take a look at what's happening to African American communities. For example wealth, wealth in African American communities is almost zero. The history is striking.

Noam Chomsky

#19. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.

John Henrik Clarke

#20. I'm always telling people baseball needs to be more prominent in the African American community. What a better way to do so, going on these TV shows and appearing on the cover of this or that. Now kids can see how baseball can change your life. Frank Thomas did that for me.

Matt Kemp

#21. When I was born, I was colored. I soon became a Negro. Not long after that I was black. Most recently I was African-American. It seems we're on a roll here. But I am still first and foremost in search of freedom.

Harry Belafonte

#22. What basketball expresses is what jazz expresses. Certain cultural predispositions to make art. All African-American art has a substratum, or baseline, of improvisation and spontaneity. You find that in both basketball and jazz.

John Edgar Wideman

#23. I think there's a lot of things that occur within the African-American community, that we would prefer to stay within the African-American community - that we get a little nervous when you start having scenes or dialogue that we know is going to be viewed and heard on a national or global scale.

Gabrielle Union

#24. The perception of linked fate and that feeling of being always on the spot as a representative of the race, at least in mixed company, are features of African American life that predate affirmative action and arise outside of its presence.

Randall Kennedy

#25. I feel like we need to make new superheroes, African-American superheroes, that people would accept.

Terry Crews

#26. One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#27. Are things getting better with each generation? Yes. It's quite interesting to be living in these times, for me to witness an African-American being elected president. It's quite extraordinary.

Lenny Kravitz

#28. We don't intend to always keep this necessarily African oriented. Originally I had hoped to have African American Indian of this area, and the Appalachian of this area, but at the same time, just as we have the Haitian room, we will always have room for another exhibit.

Katherine Dunham

#29. 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

#30. Now I've devoted my life to making sure that I can be a trailblazer for any other African American kids or any other gay kids or any other kids that just feel weird or uncomfortable and have their own issues and don't know how to express themselves. I want to be like a beacon for those kids now.

Todrick Hall

#31. There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and will do anything to prevent that.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#32. If it were in our national security to deploy to South Africa under apartheid, would we have found it acceptable or customary to segregate African American soldiers from other American soldiers, and say, 'It's just a cultural thing'? I don't think so. I would hope not.

Martha McSally

#33. 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

#34. It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans - the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. This city will be a majority African American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans.

Ray Nagin

#35. As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

Coretta Scott King

#36. America was magnificently characterized in November of 2008 when we elected, for the first time, an African-American President of the United States.

David Scott

#37. 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

#38. One of the biggest things I understood in a program like that was that it allowed more young African American scholars to do field research in the Caribbean and in Africa than had ever happened before in the history of the country and since.

Bernice Johnson Reagon

#39. You never hear about a pit bull doing anything good in the media. And they have a stigma to them ... and, in many ways, pit bulls are like young African-American males. Whenever you see us in the news, it's for getting shot and killed or shooting and killing somebody - for being a stereotype.

Ryan Coogler

#40. I was repeatedly told that there isn't an African American woman who can open a show on Broadway. I said, 'Well, how do we know? How do we know if we don't do it?' I said, 'I think you're wrong.'

Lynn Nottage

#41. Every pastor I talk to says, and particularly if they're African American they'll say, "I'm not black enough for African Americans. I'm not white enough for the whites. I'm not Hispanic enough."

Michael Emerson

#42. Roy is my favorite security guy. He's a huge African-American gentleman who always has a beautiful smile on his face. He's the King of the Main Desk, and I'm always glad to arrive at work and bask in his magnificent good cheer.

Audrey Niffenegger

#43. The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they're not gone.

Naomi Wolf

#44. You gotta understand, my great-grandfather was German and Irish. My grandmother was Indian, and my grandfather was African-American, so we all got a little something in us.

Tracy Morgan

#45. Philosophically, Dubois may have had no problem with a great African American institution. On the other hand, he always believed ultimately in the co-mingling of groups and the interplay of talents and in the collaboration of groups.

David Levering Lewis

#46. I'm the whitest guy you will ever meet. The first time I saw an African-American, my dad had to tell me to stop staring.

Glenn Beck

#47. Interestingly, a lot of the polling that I see is not along racial lines, but along generational lines. We are doing better and better among younger people, not so well among older people, whether they're African-American, whether they're white or whether they're Latino.

Bernie Sanders

#48. Myself, I happen to be married to an African-American woman, and we're together 17 years. We took a few trips to the South 15 years ago, and we were sobered by some of the reactions people had - how subtle or not-so-subtle their reactions were.

Tom Verica

#49. Now goverments are a different thing. Presidents who do not want me. As I said, an African-American discriminates against an indigenous Bolivian. Well, they have their reasons, but sooner or later we will all be judged.

Evo Morales

#50. There are so few guys who do action and do it well. Even fewer who are African-American. Even fewer who have classical-theater training. So a cat like me coming in, I'm bringing all of that to an action movie.

Wesley Snipes

#51. [Michael] Brown's mom, Lesley McSpadden, is the latest African American mother whose tear-streaked face forces the nation to remember the name of yet another unarmed black teenager gunned down under questionable circumstances.

Jonathan Capehart

#52. Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American ... Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.

Colson Whitehead

#53. Being one of the few African American women to make it to this level in a classical ballet company, the level of American Ballet Theatre, takes a lot of perseverance.

Misty Copeland

#54. The Civil Rights for Musicians Act is about economic justice for African American artists. It's about what's right. And it's about time.

Dionne Warwick

#55. I think music is one of the hero/sheroes of the African-American existence.

Maya Angelou

#56. A second reason African American students are not excelling is that we have all been affected by our society's deeply ingrained bias of equating blackness with inferiority.

Lisa Delpit

#57. Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

Bobby McFerrin

#58. You have Vampire Weekend who have more African references musically than most African-American artists.

Solange Knowles

#59. During the 2008 campaign, I strongly endorsed Barack Obama for president. I did so early, when many Democratic leaders - including many prominent African-American politicians - believed the safe bet was to back then-front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Douglas Wilder

#60. The African-American experience is one of the most important threads in the American tapestry.

Bill Frist

#61. I could fall in love with a sumo wrestler if he told stories and made me laugh. Obviously, it would be easier if someone was African-American and lived next door and went to the same church. Because then I wouldn't have to translate.

Maya Angelou

#62. The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival.

Bernice Johnson Reagon

#63. There is no way that we know what is going on between the African American and the Asian American. We don't understand what an Indigenous American is. We don't understand what a Latino American is.

Edward James Olmos

#64. I have been privileged to have the opportunity to work with many of African American fraternal and social organizations that are active in my congressional district. They all do important work that makes a tangible difference to the quality of life in our community.

Chris Van Hollen

#65. As an African-American male born with a couple of strikes against you because of your skin color, I think it's very, very important to have some positive role models around, especially male influences.

Omari Hardwick

#66. We are the in midst of a bipartisan moment as it relates to criminal justice reform and dealing with mass incarceration in America which disproportionately impacts the African-American community.

Hakeem Jeffries

#67. [According to Twitter] 24 percent of American Twitter users are African-American. That's about twice as high as African-Americans are represented in the population.

Ethan Zuckerman

#68. If you're African American, you are forced into making different choices, in a lot of cases, than you are as a white person.

Daryl Hall

#69. 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

#70. We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.

Roger Ebert

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

Mark Steyn

#72. To understand how Republicans lost the African American vote, we must first understand how we won the African American vote.

Rand Paul

#73. Introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard

Barack Obama

#74. I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

Denzel Washington

#75. You leave your neighborhood but you never want to forget where you came from," he says. "I have the best of best worlds. I'm street smart and book smart. You put that together in an African-American male and that's dangerous.

Anonymous

#76. My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.

Cory Booker

#77. I am not 'African American' - I am black American.

John McWhorter

#78. I started to study the flute in 1951. The flute has been utilized by African-American musicians as far back as the early Twenties. If you take a look at some of the old pictures of Chick Webb, then you will see the flute right there on the bandstand among the woodwinds.

Yusef Lateef

#79. Because when I go places and I talk to kids and I talk to parents and I talk to athletes all over, and they look at my story and they see a person, African-American or not, they see something that they can relate to.

Cam Newton

#80. You know what the lowest rated episode we ever had was? Where Captain Kirk kissed Uhuru - a white man kissing an African-American woman. All the stations in the American South - in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - refused to air it. And so our ratings plummeted.

George Takei

#81. I think the most critical needs of the African-American communities aren't being addressed primarily because of decisions being made by Republican Congressional leaders.

Melissa Harris-Perry

#82. Major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.

Michelle Alexander

#83. Louis Brandeis never had the opportunity - or he never sought the opportunity I should say - to work closely with African American lawyers. He was also a Southern Democrat, you know, at a time when both parties were supportive of segregation.

Jeffrey Rosen

#84. People identify with me - everyone does - African American women, Caucasian women, they all identify with me because I'm ethnic.

Janice Dickinson

#85. If we can elect an African American as president, we can support gay marriage! Defeat prop 8! We will not give up!

Madonna Ciccone

#86. My mother birthed three children and she adopted myself and another African-American son. My adoptive parents were Finnish. I grew up in a white picket neighborhood.

Michael Franti

#87. (Harry Reid) was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama - a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.

Harry Reid

#88. The Botanischer Garten in Berlin has one of Europe's finer winter trails, leading in careful order from glasshouses devoted to African-American and Australian desert species, through a fine collection of tropical plants, and on to the orchid house.

John Burnside

#89. Every African-American I know has two faces. There's the face that we have for ourselves and the face we put on for white America for the places we have to get to.

Lee Daniels

#90. I think others may look at the uniqueness of my candidacy, the fact that I'm an African-American, conservative tea party Republican, and somehow race injects itself into the conversation.

Niger Innis

#91. I think it is so great right now that we are in an age where there's an African American president in office. I think it is important for our generation to really witness that.

Sufe Bradshaw

#92. I hate white people writing for black people; it's so offensive. So we go out and look specifically for African-American voices.

Lee Daniels

#93. Warren Moon and Doug Williams really didn't run that much. That's the negative stereotype when it comes to African-American quarterbacks, that most of us just run. Those guys threw it around. I like to think I can throw it around a little bit.

Robert Griffin III

#94. I did want to mark the fact that it was the first African-American to win the Lead Actress category.I thought it was so progressive.

Viola Davis

#95. 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

#96. Beyond [Barack Obama] having made history as the first African-American president, I hope that he gets re-elected for what he does while in office, not for his skin color. I certainly believe he has the capacity.

Lenny Kravitz

#97. I was the first African-American woman to play Maggie in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.' It was at the Virginia State Theatre, and we turned Richmond upside down.

Tamara Tunie

#98. I would love to get a role that changes the landscape of being an African American woman in television and film.

Candice Patton

#99. It's been obvious that [Republicans]'re doing everything they can to make [Obama] fail. And I hope, I hope - and I say this seriously - I hope that's based on substance and not the fact that he's African-American.

Harry Reid

#100. One of two historically African American communities that sprang up along the Mississippi Gulf Coast after emancipation, North Gulfport has always been a place where residents have had fewer civic resources than those extended to other outlying communities.

Natasha Trethewey