Top 86 Quotes About Being African
#1. 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
#2. I'm not a prophet; I can only use historical reality to come to a view of the future, and my view is that Africa will return to being African and not European. The advent of colonialism was foreign to the country itself, but it will return to what it was before the Europeans arrived.
Wilbur Smith
#3. The motto of West African cooking is that if the food doesn't set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper.
Ben Aaronovitch
#4. Me being a black girl in London, whose mom is first-generation African and whose dad is West Indian, gives me a different view. I'm coming at soul from my own place.
Estelle
#5. It's very difficult, I would imagine, to distinguish father and daughter. And maybe some of it comes as I'm doing my thing and my father being a very strong political African figure for so many years. Whatever he does is almost like some kind of cloud on top.
Isabel Dos Santos
#6. I personally am tired of being a subject of study and rescue. A subject that is not imagined upon to have their own thought patterns.
Malebo Sephodi
#7. 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
#8. Because I'm attracted to you. Because you're the poster child for contradictions and I enjoy each one of them. You're funny when you're being so damn serious. You have a kind heart and protective nature that reminds me so much of my father.
N.D. Jones
#9. No one would stand for it [being the fool in the media] in a minute if you took any other group -Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, women - but somehow it's okay to do that with hillbillies.
John Shelton Reed
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America
Paul Robeson
#14. Depression is like being under house arrest, only there is no house.
Lisa Eley
#15. We pride ourselves as being top, really, on the African ladder ... We feel that we have actually been advancing rather than going backwards.
Robert Mugabe
#16. 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
#17. A good man ("un homme de bien", Fr.) never wholly perishes, the best part of his being outlives (or survives) in eternity.
African Spir
#18. Today we are a nation at peace with itself, united in our diversity, not only proclaiming but living out the contention that South Africa belongs to all who live in it. We take our place amongst the nations of the world, confident and proud in being an African country.
Nelson Mandela
#19. Clearly, a large number of African-Americans don't have faith that the laws are being executed fairly in Ferguson, and that's a problem ... We need to ensure Africans-Americans feel confident in the rule of law.
Claire McCaskill
#20. Being the only African American at this level in American Ballet Theater, I feel like people are looking at me, and it's my responsibility for me to do whatever I can to provide these opportunities in communities to be able to educate them.
Misty Copeland
#21. My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.
Cornel West
#22. I would love to get a role that changes the landscape of being an African American woman in television and film.
Candice Patton
#23. I've always loved being gay. Sure, Kenya was not exactly Queer Nation but my sexuality gave me joy. I was young, not so dumb and full of cum! There was no place for me in heaven but I was content munching devil's pie here on earth.
Diriye Osman
#24. Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped.
Wole Soyinka
#25. When I was a child, to call someone 'black' was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight.
But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close to the soil and the sky, of plain speaking. Of The Journey.
Bonnie Greer
#26. We need a broader party. If we're not doing better with millennials and women and Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans and others, we will have a tough time being a majority party at the national level.
Rob Portman
#27. With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.
Shawn Johnson
#28. Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population.
Dave Matthews
#29. Being black has a lot to do with my ...
Willi Smith
#30. Obama's a great speaker. Because of his speaking ability and his appearance, a lot of guys got on board. Being the first African American, a lot guys got on board.
Pete Rose
#31. I don't have a problem with these Arizona laws. I have a problem with Chicano, Gay and Lesbian, Asian-American and African-American histories not being taught in American History courses.
M.G. Hardie
#32. African music, though very old, is always being rediscovered in the West.
Miriam Makeba
#33. Um," I asked, "isn't the whole point about being a slave that you don't have a choice to be anything else?" Prettying up the word slave with the adjective-noun constructions makes "enslaved African" sound nonchalant. As in "Those were the cabins of the jolly leprechauns.
Sarah Vowell
#34. When I was growing up, so many of the important changes for African-Americans were being made in the United States Supreme Court and were being made by lawyers. I followed the court very intensely and wanted to do that for my life.
Leah Ward Sears
#35. Being black and speaking properly are not mutually exclusive. My father was an African, and he spoke beautifully at home. Nelson Mandela speaks beautifully. Should Mandela put his hat on backwards and say, 'Yo, homey, this is Nelson. Yo, Winnie, yo, this is def'?
Franklyn Ajaye
#36. 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
#37. As the African American theologian James Cone notes, "Far from being songs of passive resignation, the spirituals are black freedom songs which emphasize black liberation as consistent with divine revelation.
James Martin
#38. Being black, I'm involved in the reparations movement. It's focused toward the African-American audience. We could begin to heal.
Cassandra Wilson
#40. I wouldn't mind my book being called an African novel if it didn't invite lazy readings.
Taiye Selasi
#41. Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face.
Carol Moseley Braun
#42. I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.
Richard Wright
#43. The large ensemble cast and the fact that it was being shot in New York, combined with a lot of strong positive images as far as African Americans are concerned, really turned me on to The Best Man.
Taye Diggs
#44. I paved the way for a lot of white artists now that don't have to deal with the stigma of being a white artist. I don't think that people would be as open for non-African American artists like that if it I didn't take a lot of the slack for them.
Jon B.
#45. There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.
Paul Theroux
#46. 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
#47. We don't all have to take the same coordinates to get to the same destination. Being a young African American female artist, I want to open doors for young black girls.
Janelle Monae
#48. I don't strive on being the most beautiful woman in the room! I strive to be the most unique! The one who stands out, the one you will never forget.
Sahndra Fon Dufe
#49. My plays aren't stylistically the same. Just being an African-American woman playwright on Broadway is experimental.
Suzan-Lori Parks
#50. I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.
Athol Fugard
#51. Republicans have called for a National African-American Museum. The plan is being held up by finding a location that isn't in their neighborhood.
Conan O'Brien
#52. Trying to be really dark and alienating just felt exhausting to me, so I started going back to the music that I grew up with, whether it was African music or pop music. It took me away from being overly self-conscious about what I was doing.
St. Lucia
#53. I am an African. I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.
Thabo Mbeki
#54. I hope that at this moment you are thinking of yourself as a human being rather than as an American, Asian, European, African, or member of any particular country. These loyalties are secondary.
Dalai Lama
#55. I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, I have never been a slave; even today, inside me, here, and here, I am still a free woman.
Manu Herbstein
#56. I have a very personal interest. I am a Miami-Dade voter. One of the issues is that my vote and so many other votes of women and African Americans in Florida are being discounted or discarded. I want my vote to count.
Patricia Ireland
#57. As African-Americans, that's what's being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it's because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body.
Claudia Rankine
#59. I am half Puerto Rican, a quarter German and a quarter black. That was always a big issue for me - being mixed race - because casting directors tended to be very like, 'OK, are you Hispanic for this role?' 'Or is she going to be African American?'
Naya Rivera
#60. 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
#61. She said "sweet boy" again, as if making a diagnosis like tooth decay or flat feet. I was embarrassed. I didn't know if I was being insulted or complimented.
Shawn Stewart Ruff
#62. 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
#63. AFC Leopards were as thrilling a side as ever took the pitch and they dominated East African football in the eighties. That Kenyan players were an excitable bunch was attested to in one memorable Leopards match, with the opposing goalkeeper being handcuffed and dragged away to jail by police.
David Bennun
#64. I think a lot of African-American kids don't have fathers to teach them how to dress, so you end up being taught by pictures in magazine and movies. You see cowboys, Indians, old Hollywood films, Cary Grant. It has an effect on you.
Andre Benjamin
#65. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#66. They think America is like a major league in entertainment. For me personally being here for the past year-and-a-half, I know some of the arguments and discrepancies African American actors have with the opportunities here.
Aml Ameen
#67. The histories of our two peoples, Palestinian and South African, correspond in such painful and poignant ways, that I intensely feel myself being at home amongst compatriots
Nelson Mandela
#68. In some African tribes, this would make us married," a dry male voice returned. Angel looked up. His arms reflexively gripping her waist, a tall, lean man with windswept black hair looked down at her with amused emerald eyes. "In others, it would mean we're being prepared for supper
Suzanne Enoch
#69. You don't have to be African American to really enjoy 'Frisky Business'. But as far as being black, a lot of people in New York have been stopped and frisked, so that hits home for them.
Jessica Williams
#70. Those close to Mr. Obama say he grows irritated at being misunderstood - not just by opponents who insinuate that he caters to African-Americans, but also by black lawmakers and intellectuals who fault him for not making his presidency an all-out assault on racial disparity.
Jodi Kantor
#71. Being an African filmmaker, Africa is what's important for me. If I were to shot a film in France or elsewhere it would only be because the story that was being told was something that concerned me, and that really called me or needed to be shown on the screen.
Abderrahmane Sissako
#72. Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.
Aberjhani
#73. One of the great things about African-Americans is that we've always had this attitude: We make do with what we got. It comes from our ancestors being slaves.
Spike Lee
#74. All definitions of wilderness that exclude people seem to me to be false. African 'wilderness' areas are racist because indigenous people are being cleared out of them so white people can go on holiday there.
Jay Griffiths
#75. If you're colored, you get the short end of the stick. If you're a woman, you get the short end of the stick. So what do we get for being colored and women?
Sherri L. Smith
#76. Samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it's also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive - because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.
Mick Jagger
#77. 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
#78. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery
Trent Franks
#79. Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#80. I can't be a South African without being an African first.
Evans Biya
#81. I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.
Paul Beatty
#83. I guess probably in my time in politics, it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community, despite being subscription television's most valuable customers, they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options.
J. C. Watts
#84. When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.
James Baldwin
#85. Entering the foyer, Royale already decided that he would thank Shake once more for being by his side at Keena's recital. But she stunned him by eagerly waiting for him just like old times - on her knees wearing only a collar and a leash.
S.B. Redd
#86. She said I was a monster, and for a long time I believed her. But you made me feel like a man, someone worthy of being loved. Then you went away, and I had nothing, nothing but a
hopeless demon inside.
N.D. Jones
