Black People Quotes - Page 18

• Niggerization is the result of oppression -- and it doesn't just apply to the black people. Old people, poor people, and students can also get niggerized.

  Florynce Kennedy

  People, Black, Minorities

  10 Copy quote

• Racism is when you have laws set up, systematically put in a way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a people. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing... then it will be done, but not until then.

  Spike Lee

  Law, White, America

  9 Copy quote

• Liberals want to set up social welfare committees to help whites and West Indians love each other in Birmingham. But all such efforts are doomed to failure. For the strong the weak are just too much of a temptation; and in all fairness it seems to me quite wicked for black people to have tempted the powerful with so much powerless-ness for so long. The obvious answer is to redress this imbalance in power.

  Lewis Nkosi

  Strong, Powerful, Long

  Lewis Nkosi (1983). “Home and exile and other selections”, Addison-Wesley Longman Ltd

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• All black people who are even minimally conscious, black people who have ever experienced Europe's technological power crusading in the vanguard of a civilizing mission, have profound feelings of inferiority and bitterly regret the fact that the Industrial Revolution did not agreeably commence in Dahomey or Dakar. Nothing is achieved by concealing this fact.

  Lewis Nkosi

  Regret, Europe, People

  11 Copy quote

• It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.

  Henry Louis Gates

  White, People, Black

  "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. March 19, 2008.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Fighting, White, People

  4 Copy quote

• I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.

  Bernice Johnson Reagon

  Song, Thinking, People

  4 Copy quote

• In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it's as if they don't exist.

  Stephen L. Carter

  Real, Class, People

  4 Copy quote

• There had always been black people in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice.

  Carl Bernstein

  Struggle, People, House

  Carl Bernstein (1989). “Loyalties: A Son's Memoir”, Simon & Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's not too many rich black people in this world.

  Barry Bonds

  People, Black, World

  "What Bonds told BALCO grand jury". Interview with Lance Williams, Mark Fainaru-Wada, www.sfgate.com. December 3, 2004.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.

  Isabel Wilkerson

  Black And White, Play, People

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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• White people's fear of Black people with guns will never cease to amaze me. Probably it's because they think about what they would do were they in our place. Especially the police, who have done so much dirt to Black people - their guilty conscience tells them to be afraid. When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.

  Assata Shakur

  Fighting, Gun, Thinking

  188 Copy quote

• I come from somewhere and from specific black people in the South, including my parents, who built our first school, and rebuilt it after it was burned to the ground. And they used to bake pies and cakes to raise money to keep it going. So, I learned to struggle from a very early way in a way that was truly indigenous to the South.

  Alice Walker

  Struggle, School, People

  Source: www.pittsburghurbanmedia.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Now I see why reading was illegal for black people during slavery. I discover that I think in words. The more words I know, the more things I can think about. My vocab and thoughts grow together like the stem and petals of a flower. Reading was illegal because if you limit someone's vocab, you limit their thoughts. They can't even think of freedom because they don't have the language to.

  M. K. Asante

  Flower, Reading, Thinking

  26 Copy quote

• You know why Guns n' Roses aren't a good band? Because no black people listen to them.

  Anton Newcombe

  Gun, Rose, People

  11 Copy quote

• I need to be famous so I can talk about religion. I can talk about God. It's an expensive price that I have to pay to be the most famous man on earth and I do it with pleasure only for God. My fight is only and introduction to the real fight, the one for God. Fighting by itself doesn't interest me anymore. I want to help people, the black people and I need any kind of media to spread my thought: God, charity, peace.

  Muhammad Ali

  Real, Fighting, Men

  "New Again: Muhammad Ali". Interview with Daniela Morera, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 26, 2012.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Black people ALL are fightin' you all for freedom, justice and equality. One believes that intermarriage is gonna solve it, and 200 years from now we all will be a beautiful cream color. He really believes it. One believe that gittin' some rifles and shootin' up the country is gonna solve it, another believes that education. One day we'll be the president. One believe that we gotta git into the white man's pockets and get all the money.

  Muhammad Ali

  Beautiful, Country, Believe

  Source: thefederalist.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow, the jails ended up full of poor black people.

  Howard Zinn

  Clever, Law, Jail

  Howard Zinn (2015). “A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present”, p.516, Routledge

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Country, People, African American

  Source: www.pbs.org

  39 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've heard that Black people and Black faces don't sell magazines, but one day you're going to beg me to be on there.

  Michael Jackson

  People, Black, One Day

  Source: www.pbs.org

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Michael [Jackson] reconstructed his face and deconstructed the African features into a spooky European geography of fleshly possibilities, and yet what we couldn't deny, that even as his face got whiter and whiter his music got Blacker and Blacker. His soul got more deeply rooted in the existential agony and the profound social grief that Black people are heir to.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Grief, Agony, Profound

  Source: www.pbs.org

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• My definition of good is that you understand that this is a question of power. That you be willing to give up some power. That you be willing to give up some resources. That you be willing to pay Black people reparations for our years and years of service in this country. That you be willing to go home and tell your white mother and father about white racism and how it affects and kills Black people in our communities. That's my definition of good white people, and I haven't met any like that.

  Sister Souljah

  Mother, Country, Giving Up

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals. Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don't fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America. Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom.

  Juan Williams

  Education, Uncles, America

  "Rutgers rage against Rice -- why do liberals have so much hate for black conservatives?" by Juan Williams, www.foxnews.com. March 9, 2014.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• We're hip to the fact that Superman never saved no black people. You got that?

  Bobby Seale

  People, Black, Facts

  Bobby Seale (1978). “A Lonely Rage: The Autobiography of Bobby Seale”, Crown

  91 Copy quote

  Show source

• Frederick Douglas's agenda was an agenda, not for black people to get out of slavery. It was for America to become a better democracy. And it's spilt over for women's rights; it's split over for worker's rights and so forth.

  Cornel West

  America, Rights, People

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

  11 Copy quote

  Show source