African American Quotes - Page 24

• Once there are more African Americans and Asian Americans behind the scenes as producers, writers, and directors, I think more inclusive casting will happen.

  Nicole Ari Parker

  Thinking, Directors, Asian

  "INTERVIEW: Streetcar Star Nicole Ari Parker and Boris Kodjoe Are a Couple of Smart Actors". Interview with Brian Scott Lipton, www.theatermania.com. April 17, 2012.

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• When you set a play in the French Quarter in New Orleans, it's hard not to acknowledge the whole African-American, French, white mixing of races. That's what the French Quarter is: it's a Creole community.

  Nicole Ari Parker

  New Orleans, Race, Play

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• 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

  Country, Zero, Race

  "Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide". Interview with Laura Flanders, www.alternet.org. May 4, 2012.

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• You take a look at the history of African Americans in the US. There's been about thirty years of relative freedom. There was a decade after the Civil War and before north/south compact essentially recriminalized black life. During the Second World War there was a need for free labor so there was a freeing up of the labor force. Blacks benefitted from it.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Labor Force, Years

  "Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide". Interview with Laura Flanders, www.alternet.org. May 4, 2012.

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• We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that.

  Noam Chomsky

  Racism, Black, Males

  "Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide". Interview with Laura Flanders, www.alternet.org. May 4, 2012.

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• The areas in which I teach are working-class history and African-American Studies and at its best the critical study of whiteness often grows out of those areas. The critical examination of whiteness, academic and not, simply involves the effort to break through the illusion that whiteness is natural, biological, normal, and not crying out for explanation.

  David Roediger

  Break Through, Class, Effort

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• I think anyone that comes to Nigeria has to offer value. What value are you bringing? There are Black Americans here. I think we've moved beyond that Africans vs. African Americans. They may have more issues with us than we do with them.

  Mo Abudu

  Thinking, Issues, Black

  Source: www.ebony.com

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• One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery.

  Randall Robinson

  Eight, People, Community

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 26, 2005.

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• Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that's chewing up.

  Randall Robinson

  Salary, Unemployment, Looks

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 26, 2005.

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• 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

  Art, Race, Space

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where [African-Americans] could live in the North [still exist today.] And ... the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration.

  Isabel Wilkerson

  Ghetto, Migration, Today

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• At the beginning of the 20th century, before the migration began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the end of the Great Migration, nearly half of them were living outside the South in the great cities of the North and West. So when this migration began, you had a really small number of people who were living in the North and they were surviving as porters or domestics or preachers - some had risen to levels of professional jobs - but they were, in some ways, protected because they were so small.

  Isabel Wilkerson

  Jobs, Small Numbers, Cities

  "Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. September 13, 2010.

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• 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

  New York, New Orleans, Cities

  Source: progressive.org

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• African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll.

  David Simon

  Loss, Rocks, Rock And Roll

  Source: progressive.org

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• I was very proud and grateful to be the first African-American woman in the position. I thought it said a lot about our country that we had back-to-back African-American Secretaries of State, Colin Powell and then me. I also thought it said a lot about President Bush that he didn't see limits on the highest ranking diplomat in terms of color. It's a hard job, but really the best one in government.

  Condoleezza Rice

  Country, Jobs, Grateful

  Source: aalbc.com

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• So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Memories, Book, Kids

  "Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - The “The African Americans” Interview". Interview with Kam Williams, aalbc.com. October 15, 2013.

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• I use African-American, because I teach African Studies as well as African-American Studies, so it's easy, neat and convenient. But sometimes, when you're in a barber shop, somebody'll say, "Did you see what that Negro did?" A lot of people slip in and out of different terms effortlessly, and I don't think the thought police should be on patrol.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Thinking, People, Police

  "Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - The "The African Americans" Interview". Interview with Kam Williams, aalbc.com.

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• 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

  Flutes, Musician, Twenties

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• I'm looking at the head of the household, and the house hasn't been run properly for a long time, ... Clinton was the first person ever to make a formal apology to black people for slavery, which was very warm and appreciated. But African-Americans haven't healed at all . The wound is still very open. And seeing the differences in how people live, it just puts salt in it- constantly . Seeing the way we're treated within these United States ... it burns you even more every day.

  Jill Scott

  Running, Apology, Differences

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• In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

  Barack Obama

  Real, Mean, Past

  A More Perfect Union, delivered 18 March 2008, Philadelphia, PA

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• I am tired with hyphenated Americans! We are not Indian-Americans, or African-Americans.

  Bobby Jindal

  Tired, American Indian, Indian

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• The police killings of unarmed African Americans has got to stop.

  Bernie Sanders

  Police, Killing, Unarmed

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• I don't do stuff to be a star. I do it because I feel it's important for kids, African American kids, to see an African American face that plays baseball.

  Matt Kemp

  Baseball, Stars, Kids

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• In a moment when young black voters were key to the election and the reelection of a black president, when the Department of Justice has been led these years by the first two African-American attorneys general, when many big cities boast African-American league prosecutors and police chiefs and mayors, even in this moment, why is it that it still feels to so many young people that there is more power for change on the court than in the courts?

  Melissa Harris-Perry

  Years, Cities, Two

  Source: www.msnbc.com

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• I always thought books were just the canon, things I couldn't identify with. And then I was introduced to really amazing multicultural literature - it was all things I was trying to do unsuccessfully in my poetry. It really just changed everything. I was introduced to authors like Sandra Cisneros, Gabriel García Márquez, Junot Díaz, and a lot of African American literature, as well.

  Matt de la Pena

  Book, Trying, Gabriel

  Source: therumpus.net

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