Black Women Quotes - Page 14

• Work for black women has been an important and valued dimension of Afrocentric definitions of black motherhood.

  Patricia Hill Collins

  Motherhood, Being A Mom, Black

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• Growing up, I didn't receive the representation that I wanted so badly. I was always looking out for black characters - black women - that were specifically just about existing and weren't necessarily racialized or were centered around race.

  Amandla Stenberg

  Growing Up, Character, Black

  Source: www.mtv.com

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• . . . black women . . . are trained from childhood to become workers, and expect to be financially self-supporting for most of their lives. They know they will have to work, whether they are married or single; work to them, unlike to white women, is not a liberating goal, but rather an imposed lifelong necessity.

  Gerda Lerner

  Self, White, Goal

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• Usually, when people talk about the "strength" of black women . . . . they ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.

  Bell Hooks

  Strong, Confused, Reality

  bell hooks (2014). “Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism”, p.6, Routledge

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• You can fall, but you can rise also.

  Angelique Kidjo

  Happiness, Moving On, Success

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• Here I am, the artist, the person, the black woman, and the stereotype. I'm using myself and it has nothing to do with my muses or other women. It has to do with me. You see parts of my body moving, very collage like, flashing, and not speaking, just laying on a couch, looking out at the viewer.

  Mickalene Thomas

  Moving, Artist, Here I Am

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Lord, I never seen blue hair on a black woman before or since. Leroy say you look like a cracker from outer space.

  Kathryn Stockett

  Hair, Blue, Space

  Kathryn Stockett (2009). “The Help”, p.240, Penguin

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• I'm an African woman, I suppose these thoughts torture me more than they do black American people, because it's like watching my own children trapped in a car that's sinking to the bottom of a lake and being impotent to save them'the black Americans have their own holocaust going on. You see the black man erasing black children from the landscape, you see black women desperately trying to get the black man's attention by wearing blonde hair and fake blue eyes, 500 years after he sold her and their children across the ocean.

  Kola Boof

  Children, Ocean, Eye

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• The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder-in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

  Maya Angelou

  Block, Ghetto, Men

  "Bill Moyers Journal", billmoyers.com. November 21, 1973.

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• You are a white. The Imperial Wizard. Now, if you don't think this is logic you can burn me on the fiery cross. This is the logic: You have the choice of spending fifteen years married to a woman, a black woman or a white woman. Fifteen years kissing and hugging and sleeping real close on hot nights. With a black, black woman or a white, white woman. The white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne. So you're not concerned with black or white anymore, are you? You are concerned with how cute or how pretty. Then let's really get basic and persecute ugly people!

  Lenny Bruce

  Cute, Real, Sleep

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• I would tell young people to start where they are with what they have and that the secret of a big success is starting with a small success and dreaming bigger and bigger dreams, I would tell them also that a young Black woman or a young Black man can't dream too much today or dare too much if he or she works hard, perseveres and dedicates themselves to excellence.

  John H. Johnson

  Success, Dream, Hard Work

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• I look at Woody Allen's prolific career of 30 or 40 films, and I'm watching the clock. I'd love to work at a clip of a film a year. We don't get the benefit of the doubt, particularly black women. We're presumed incompetent, whereas a white male is assumed competent until proven otherwise. They just think the guy in the ball hat and the T-shirt over the thermal has got it, whether he's got it or not. For buzzy first films by a white male, the trajectory is a 90-degree angle. For us, it's a 30-degree angle.

  Dee Rees

  Thinking, Years, Careers

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• There are more than 100 million African women who go topless at some point in the day, each and every day, to honor both God and our ancestors. So being in a country like America where nothing is hated more than the image of the black woman, even by black people'because her womb produces the black man and makes us black'I find it of grave importance to implement African images, and especially to produce media images that acknowledge the sexual power and fertility of black women.

  Kola Boof

  Country, Men, America

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• I believe that Christianity trains black people, especially black women, to think like slaves, and I believe that Islam is mainly fueled by its hatred for women.

  Kola Boof

  Believe, Thinking, People

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• I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Oysters, Knives, Black History

  World Tomorrow "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928)

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• When black women are down with you and in your corner, you have an ally that will move Heaven and Earth.

  Tyler Perry

  Strong Women, Moving, Heaven

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  Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.

  Coretta Scott King

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Forgiveness

  "Understanding Cultural Diversity in Today's Complex World". Book by Leo Parvis, p. 54, 2010.

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• I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.

  Bell Hooks

  Happiness, Success, Perseverance

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• As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

  Toni Morrison

  Inspirational, Dream, Thinking

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• Knowing what must be done does away with fear.

  Rosa Parks

  Inspiring, Strong Women, Fear

  Rosa Parks, Gregory J. Reed (1994). “Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman who Changed a Nation”, Zondervan

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• I used to think I was ugly. I thought I looked like a camel. A person who doesn't love themselves, they will see anything that pops up on their face. I've seen squirrels, I've seen a bird, and I've seen all kinds of animals on my face. But that is the result of self-hate. I've learned to say: 'You know what? I am a beautiful black woman'.

  Mary J. Blige

  Beautiful, Hate, Animal

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• Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.

  Audre Lorde

  Moving, Racism, Competition

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.48, Crossing Press

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• Perhaps...I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself--a Black woman warrior poet doing my work--come to ask you, are you doing yours?

  Audre Lorde

  Warrior, Black, Faces

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• I decided blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I had faced, so I decided to open a flying school and teach other black women to fly.

  Bessie Coleman

  Women, School, Flying

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• A Different World was run by black women, Debbie Allen and Yvette Lee Bowser. Lead writer Susie Fales-Hill was a hero of mine, because she was 28 when she was running one of the top shows on television. Going to work every day and seeing black women in charge made that normal to me.

  Gina Prince-Bythewood

  Running, Hero, Black

  Source: www.mtv.com

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