Blacks Quotes

“Black people always found a way in the most miserable circumstances. If we didn't, we'd have been exterminated by the white man long ago.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Because, you know, a colored woman with class is still an exceptional creature; and a colored woman with class, style, poetry, taste, elegance, repartee, and haute cuisine is an almost nonexistent species.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“America was big and blighted in gamey spots by racial intolerance and violence. Visiting relatives in Georgia? Here are the safe routes around the sundown towns and cracker territories where you might not make it out alive, the towns and counties to be avoided if you valued your life.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Americans today see the Black body as larger, more threatening, more potentially harmful, and more likely to require force to control than a similarly sized White body, according to researchers. No wonder the Black body had to be lynched by the thousands, deported by the tens of thousands, incarcerated by the millions, segregated by the tens of millions.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas. Racist ideas make White people think more of themselves, which further attracts them to racist ideas.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Some White people do not identify as White for the same reason they identify as not-racist: to avoid reckoning with the ways that Whiteness—even as a construction and mirage—has informed their notions of America and identity and offered them privilege, the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. It is a racial crime to be yourself if you are not White in America. It is a racial crime to look like yourself or empower yourself if you are not White. I guess I became a criminal at seven years old.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“The assassination of President Kennedy killed not only a man but a complex of illusions. It demolished the myth that hate and violence can be confined in an airtight chamber to be employed against but a few. Suddenly the truth was revealed that hate is a contagion; that it grows and spreads as a disease; that no society is so healthy that it can automatically maintain its immunity. If a smallpox epidemic had been raging in the South, President Kennedy would have been urged to avoid the area. There was a plague afflicting the South, but its perils were not perceived.

Negroes tragically know political assassination well. In the life of Negro civil-rights leaders, the whine of the bullet from ambush, the roar of the bomb have all too often broken the night's silence. They have replaced lynching as a political weapon. More than a decade ago, sudden death came to Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore, N.A.A.C.P. leaders in Florida. The Reverend George Lee of Belzoni, Mississippi, was shot to death on the steps of a rural courthouse. The bombings multiplied. Nineteen sixty-three was a year of assassinations. Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi; William Moore in Alabama; six Negro children in Birmingham—and who could doubt that these too were political assassinations?

The unforgivable default of our society has been its failure to apprehend the assassins. It is a harsh judgment, but undeniably true, that the cause of the indifference was the identity of the victims. Nearly all were Negroes. And so the plague spread until it claimed the most eminent American, a warmly loved and respected president. The words of Jesus "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" were more than a figurative expression; they were a literal prophecy.

We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man’s life was sacred only if we agreed with his views. This may explain the cascading grief that flooded the country in late November. We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“One aspect of the civil-rights struggle that receives little attention is the contribution it makes to the whole society. The Negro in winning rights for himself produces substantial benefits for the nation. Just as a doctor will occasionally reopen a wound, because a dangerous infection hovers beneath the half-healed surface, the revolution for human rights is opening up unhealthy areas in American life and permitting a new and wholesome healing to take place. Eventually the civil-rights movement will have contributed infinitely more to the nation than the eradication of racial injustice. It will have enlarged the concept of brotherhood to a vision of total interrelatedness.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“Racism will continue to thrive until we see ourselves as one. Black people stuck in Ukraine are being subjected to racism even as they attempt to flee to safety in Poland during a time of war, Black people are treated with complete and utter contempt. We should all be condemning this.”
― Olawale Daniel

“I don't know how you survived! I've been all over this bloody country and I swear to God, I don't know how you survived! This place is a million godforsaken times worse than South Africa! Christ, man, apartheid puts holes in our dignity but it leaves us our culture, man! We've still got our lifeline, our traditions... Christ Almighty, man, they didn't leave you a bloody thing! Not a bloody thing!”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“Lieutenant Thomas R. Gilligan, thirty-seven, was off duty and out of uniform, checking out TVs in an electronics store. He went to investigate the commotion and stopped James Powell, a ninth grader who had joined the mob of angry students. Powell was unarmed, according to witnesses. Gilligan maintained that the boy flashed a knife. He shot him three times.

Two days later, Harlem erupted.

Pierce told Carney, "You have the people who are angry. Justifably so. And then there's the police force. How are they going to defend this shit? Again! And city hall and the activists. And in the way back of the room, you can barely hear a little voice, and that's the family. They've lost a son. Somebody has to speak for them."

"They're going to sue?"

"Sue and win. You know they ain't going to fire the bastard." Sermon crept into his voice here. "What kind of message will that send--that their police force is accountable? We'll sue, and it will take years, and the city will pay because millions and millions are still cheaper than putting a true price on killing a black boy.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Stay on the path and you'll be safe, eat in peace, sleep in peace, breathe in peace; stray and beware. Work together and we can subvert their evil order. It was a map of the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we didn't help one another we'd be lost out there.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“My therapist says take it easy as if capitalism is listening. As if the body will ever forget what it is given.

I am Black which is history, personified.”
― KB Brookins

“The defeat that had frightened her in the faces of black men was the defeat of black forever defined by white.”
― Alice Walker

“Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head turned in whichever way is farthest from them.”
― Alice Walker

“I thought black people superior people. Not simply superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them; but to everyone. Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday school class and grin for television over their "victory," i.e., the death of four small black girls.”
― Alice Walker

“-I'm just surprised because most of the fantasy worlds in movies and books are lily white.
-Well, that's just crazy!”
― Gene Ha, Mae #1

“To curb the ongoing racism against the black community, we all need to imagine "White Lives Matter" becoming a global trend where the blacks (mostly of African history) are ripping off the whites for no good reasons but racism. We are humans, we should treat ourselves like one.”
― Olawale Daniel

“White supremacists should imagine if the reverse was the case. You hate black people but came to their land, distorted their development, culture, way of life, took their resources, and carted millions of them to work for you in Europe as your slaves. And yet, you still hating on them because they are still surviving.

What would the plot twist look like?”
― Olawale Daniel

“It's 1963: we're in the year of prophetic fulfillment. The last revival meeting is at hand, where the sons took up the cross of the fathers. White sons went forth to the dirt roads of Georgia and Alabama to prove to their fathers that the melting pot could still melt. "Negro" sons went forth to the Woolworths and Grants and Greyhounds of America to prove to their fathers that they could eat and sit and ride as well in the front as in the back, as well seated as standing.”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“Is it possible to imagine any greater amputation, any greater karmic debt, than reincarnation as a Negro?”
― Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

“It is my annual day of sobbing. What are these
brown hands for if not to bury my eyes in the
ancient rivers of wrongs?”
― Major Jackson

“She does not know
Her beauty,
She thinks her brown body
Has no glory.

If she could dance
Naked,
Under palm trees
And see her image in the river
She would know.”
― William Waring Cuney

“We were unarmed, but we knew that Blackness armed us even though we had no guns. Whiteness disarmed the cops--turned them into fearful potential victims--even when they were approaching a group of clearly outstrapped and anxious high school kids.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“I saw poor Blacks as the product of racism and not capitalism, largely because I thought I knew racism but knew I did not know capitalism. But it is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism. As Martin Luther King said in his critique of capitalism in 1967, "It means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“The integrationist strategy--the placing of White and non-White bodies in the same spaces--is thought to cultivate away the barbarism of people of color and the racism of White people. The integrationist strategy expects Black bodies to heal in proximity to Whites who haven't yet stopped fighting them.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“The system's acts are covert, just as the racist ideas of the people are implicit. I could not wrap my head around the system or precisely define it, but I knew the system was there, like the polluted air in our atmosphere, poisoning Black people to the benefit of White people.

But what if the atmosphere of racism has been polluting most White people, too?”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“I thought I had it all figured out. I thought of racism as an inanimate, immortal system, not as a living, recognizable, mortal disease of cancer cells that we could identify and treat and kill. I considered the system as essential to the United States and the Constitution. At times, I thought White people covertly operated the system, fixed it to benefit the total White community at the expense of the total Black community.

The construct of covert institutional racism opens American eyes to racism and, ironically, closes them, too. Separating the overt individual from the covert institutional veils the specific policy choices that cause racial inequities, policies made by specific people. Covering up the specific policies and policymakers prevents us from identifying and replacing the specific policies and policy makers. We become unconscious to racist policymakers and policies as we lash out angrily at the abstract bogeyman of "the system.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Yeah, I thought to myself, like LSD, a black lover is the thing this year. I had seen the white girls in the Village and at off-Broadway theaters clutching their black men tightly while I, manless, looked on with bitterness. I often vowed I would find me an ofay in self-defense, but I could never bring myself to condone the wholesale rape of my slave ancestors by letting a white man touch me.”
― Louise Meriwether

“Now,' Kaine say, 'now this man free, bo'n free, but still, any white man what say he a slave be believed cause a nigga can't talk fo the laws, not ginst no white man, not even fo his own self.”
― Sherley Anne Williams