Black People Quotes - Page 22

• The black church often has reinforced certain self images that are damaging to black peoples' beauty, black peoples' confidence.

  Cornel West

  Self, Black, Church

  Source: articles.latimes.com

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• As a Christian when I watched the people in Katrina they lost everything. I'm not just speaking about the Black people, I'm talking about White, Chinese, Oriental, whoever lost stuff. My heart went out to 'em. I said as a Christian it would be a sin before God for me to wear my gold around people, flashing it in their face and they don't have nothing. So I said never again would I wear my gold, I want people to know I have a heart of gold and not the gold around my neck.

  Mr. T

  Christian, Heart, Talking

  Source: allhiphop.com

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• Radical militant feminist believes that women of color and Black women in particular have written the cutting edge theory and really were the individuals who exploded feminist theory into the directions that has made it more powerful. So I see us as the leaders not just of Black people and Black women in terms of feminism but in terms of the movement as a whole.

  Bell Hooks

  Powerful, Believe, Cutting

  "October 2006 Interview: Bell Hooks". Interview with Pierce Freelon, blackademics.org. October 2006.

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• A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood.

  Haile Gerima

  Ideas, America, People

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• To me the industry has always said that the lovers and haters and principal characters will always be white in Hollywood, and black people will always be appendages of those kinds of dramas, or they will be comedic outlets. It will never change.

  Haile Gerima

  Drama, Character, White

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• If we [black people] do not show up and support the march towards cinematic equality, the march towards being on a level at - we don't even have to be higher than whites, but to be viewed in the same common thread of this is a professional, these are stories that people are interested in, instead of being fed the same old BS dogma that's been fed and the studios have used.

  Terrence Howard

  Common Threads, People, Support

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community - everybody - to raise a child. And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why are we hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little units - people need a larger unit.

  Toni Morrison

  Family, Children, Two

  Toni Morrison, Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (1994). “Conversations with Toni Morrison”, p.260, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.

  Toni Morrison

  Mother, Children, Father

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• Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.

  Toni Morrison

  People, Bored, Black

  Toni Morrison, Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (1994). “Conversations with Toni Morrison”, p.60, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best.

  Toni Morrison

  Art, Media, Class

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• For most Black people there is still poverty and desperation. The Ghettos still exist, and the proportion of Blacks in prison is still much greater than Whites. Today, there is less overt racism, but the economic injustices create an "institutional racism" which exists even while more Blacks are in high places, such as Condoleeza Rice in Bush's Administration and Obama running for President.

  Howard Zinn

  Running, Ghetto, People

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• I marvel at the many ways we, as black people, bend but do not break.

  Kristin Hunter

  Racism, People, Black

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• I don't want the Obama era to be more about symbolism than substance when it comes to black people. I love him, but I love black people even more.

  Tavis Smiley

  I Love Him, Symbolism, People

  Source: www.pittsburghurbanmedia.com

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• I try to write each piece in the language of the piece, so that I'm not using the same language from piece to piece. I may be using ten or twenty languages. That multiplicity of language and the use of words is African in tradition. And black writers have definitely taken that up and taken it in. It's like speaking in tongues. It may sound like gibberish to somebody, but you know it's a tongue of some kind. Black people have this. We have the ability as a race to speak in tongues, to dream in tongues, to love in tongues.

  Alexis De Veaux

  Dream, Taken, Writing

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• The blues records of each decade explain something about the philosophical basis of our lives as black people. ... Blues is a basis of historical continuity for black people. It is a ritualized way of talking about ourselves and passing it on.

  Sherley Anne Williams

  Music, Philosophical, Talking

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• Words have consequences, and I judge people not only by their words but what they do. And if you look at people who have a pattern, who've built a career out of dividing people and who built a career out of often not just Obama but finding ways to degrade and diminish African-Americans and African-American leaders. It's racist to consistently make your living on the backs of black people.

  Joan Walsh Anglund

  Careers, Judging, People

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• Throughout history there have been black people who have played mammies, all sorts of offensive images, who didn't mind doing it.

  Marc Lamont Hill

  People, Black, Mind

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• Like I tell people they wind up having short term pleasure and long term pain. I'm a tell what Minister Louis Farrakhan said, "Black people ain't poor, they just don't spend wisely" and that's the truth.

  Mr. T

  Pain, Wind, Long

  Source: allhiphop.com

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• Racial oppression of black people in America has done what neither class oppression or sexual oppression, with all their perniciousness, has ever done: destroyed an entire people and their culture.

  Eleanor Holmes Norton

  Class, America, Racism

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• That is my job as an intellectual, as an extension of my vocation: to engage in a serious reckoning with the present manifestation of both white supremacy, white refusal to acknowledge culpability, and the attempts of black people to re-describe the harm and trauma we've endured, as well as to say afresh what it is that must be done if we are to be conscientious.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Jobs, White, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I love Obama because he is proof all black people don't look alike. Nobody every told me, 'Good morning, Mr. President.' We don't all look alike.

  Paul Mooney

  Morning, People, Black

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• God made men by baking them in an oven, but he forgot about the first batch, and that's how Black people were born. And then he was so anxious about the next batch, he took them out of the oven too soon, so that's how White people were made. But the third batch he let cook until they were golden-golden-golden, and, honey, that's you and me.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Men, White, People

  Sandra Cisneros (1991). “Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories”, Random House Incorporated

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• Even if its a white crowd, I tell my jokes for the four black people in the room, not the 100 whites.

  Gary Owen

  White, People, Black

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• They don't make red noses to fit black people. I have a wide nose like a Volkswagen and I have never had a red nose that fitted me.

  Lenny Henry

  People, Black, Noses

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• Black people are the only segment in American society that is defined by its weakest elements. Every other segment is defined by its highest achievement. We have to turn that around.

  Jewell Jackson McCabe

  People, Achievement, Black

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