Top 144 Blacks Quotes

I disagree with the prevailing point of view of some black leaders that special treatment for blacks is acceptable.

The only time you had blacks, whites, and Latinos jamming together was in hip-hop. It’s an unsung history.

Republicans have to tell the truth about the issues impacting the black community. The must focus on restoring the black family, jobs, safe communities, and better schools. They have to make sure not to pander to blacks by treating them like victims or as ‘special minority’ group.

The relationship between France and its ‘foreign’ players – blacks and North African Arabs – has always been troubled, particularly with Algerians.

There is no longer a single common impediment to blacks emerging in this society.

Voter ID laws have a disproportionate impact on groups that lean democratic – including blacks, hispanics and students.

Normally, ‘black responsibility’ is a forbidden phrase for a black leader — not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites.

America has granted every wish of black Americans. It has made government the head of the black family; it has integrated the schools and neighborhoods; it has given blacks welfare and affirmative action; it has even apologized through Bill Clinton. There is simply nothing else that America can or should do.

For complicated historical and political reasons, we associate ‘poor’ in our public consciousness with ‘black.’ Terms such as ‘welfare queen’ and ‘culture of poverty’ became associated uniquely with the social maladies of African Americans in urban ghettos, despite the fact that poor whites outnumbered poor blacks.

I grew up in Los Angeles when the racial tensions between blacks and Mexicans were very high. Gang violence was very prevalent.

Many of the master chefs in the South, both the upper South as well as the deep South, were blacks and many of those people came here to Washington, D.C., and opened up establishments. Very, very few of them have survived. But they certainly were very prominent.

In 1975 I was among a group of blacks who formed the Black Americans in Support of Israel Committee.

The demise of Reconstruction had made it hard for blacks to acquire capital or to pass on property to their children. As blacks were driven from all but the most limited spheres of business and political life, the prestige of the professional rose in the black community.

Obama kept blacks broke and angry the entire eight years he was in office.

For decades, many blacks were reluctant to pursue a profession that was associated with servitude. If you went to school, it was to become a lawyer or doctor. Older generations didn’t understand why one would spend money to learn how to chop, peel, dice, and saute vegetables when that trade could be taught at home.

We’re in the same ghettos, same inner cities, and we’re suffering from the same problems. Every problem the blacks have, the Latinos have.

Republicans need to stop complaining about blacks voting over 90% for Democrats. If they’re not willing to compete in those neighborhoods, they will keep losing those voters.

I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash.

The history of blacks is complicated, fragmented, disturbing to contemplate – not a neat trail of challenges met or of felled trees blocking the path to the mountain top.

Despite allegations by liberal advocacy groups that voter suppression tactics by the right hindered minority voting, blacks represented 13 percent of the electorate in 2012, a percentage about equivalent with 2008.

I grew up in a time when there was real segregation. And blacks during the 50s and so forth took a lot of responsibility for their lives because the government didn’t.

I have often said one of the reasons more blacks don’t support Republicans is because they don’t trust the GOP establishment.

One puts on black robes to scare the hell out of white people, while the other puts on white robes to scare the hell out of blacks.

Blacks are tired of seeing whites saying, ‘I understand you.’ You need a black to direct a black film.

The social scene in Daytona Beach was simple. The white cats surf, and the blacks play music.

When blacks become humanly visible, when their true beliefs are known, their mask shatters and their symbiotic bond with whites is broken.

When you lose for the All Blacks it’s not a nice feeling. Expectations on us are pretty high. We have high standards and we know if we’ve let ourselves or let the jersey down.

Why don’t we hear more about and from Asians when it comes to race in America? Are Asians the new Invisible Man – there but not there? In some ways, yeah. Blacks and whites are always carping about the metrics of racism. And any conversation about immigration reform is immediately flipped into a referendum on Hispanics.

Republicans passed the Fourteenth Amendment, securing for blacks equal rights under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment, giving blacks the right to vote, over the Democrats’ opposition.

Sharpton and Jackson are ‘race brokers.’ Their job is to define black identity and then keep blacks in line to vote to the highest Democratic bidder that serves their purposes. ‘Black enough’ is just another tool in the bamboozler’s toolbox.

For blacks in our society, victimization may be a true issue. But it isn’t a true issue for women. Neither men nor women are victimized. The true issue, that I try to point out, is that both sexes suffer restricted roles.

Why should blacks feel elated about seeing men walk on the moon when millions of poor blacks and whites don’t have enough money to buy food to eat on earth?

In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.

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.

It is time to celebrate the New Black Americans – those who have sealed the Deal, who aren’t beholden to liberal indulgence any more than they are to the disdain of the hard Right. It is time to praise blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement.

I came into my teens unaware that most Americans, blacks as well as whites, were ignorant of the main facts of Negro history. And so it was the facts of other histories that I found most intriguing. I fell into a U.S. history major by chance late in my second year at Fisk University.

Since neither black animosity nor the Left’s falsehood of ‘racial tensions’ is based on the actual behavior of the vast majority of white Americans, nothing white America could do will affect either many blacks’ perceptions or the leftist libel.

The racism of the Nazis threatened to make whatever we had experienced look like child’s play. If they could be so brutal to the Jews, what would they do to the blacks? So large numbers of black young men and women rallied to the defence of the empire.

Blacks in America want to forget about slavery – the stigma, the shame. If you can’t be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, and that is the blues.

When we’re talking about slavery… we’re really talking about the web of relationships that exists between whites and blacks from 1619 to 1865 to now.

I have my misgivings about 3-D. I don’t like the lack of blacks and whites, how it dulls the image, how the color gets corrupted. I don’t necessarily like the experience of having heavy glasses in front of me.

One drop of black blood and you’re black. That was the rule. That’s what kept the wall between whites and blacks was this one drop rule. So I was raised with absolutely no ambiguity about that.

That’s the way blacks have been encouraged to think: that we got to stick together. You’ve got a situation today where if a black person says he thinks O.J. Simpson’s guilty, other blacks will cut their eyes at him and say, ‘You ought to go somewhere and sit down and shut up.’

Blacks have had to learn to protect themselves by being cynical but not cynical enough to slam the door on potential opportunities. We go through life walking a tightrope to prevent too much disillusionment.

The problem is, authentic hip-hop culture is street culture. And so you’ve got middle-class blacks really emulating the norms of the South Bronx, which is not really in their best interests.

The Jewish background is not that far from the black groove. Blacks are downtrodden, Jews are downtrodden, therefore they have something in common in that affliction. Being downtrodden often makes one more empathetic and sympathetic.

I think that most of the young officers I know are leftists and liberals and Democrats. And the reason is this: All of our soldiers, the men that work for us directly, are minorities – blacks or Latinos. And we empathize with them. Our job is to advise them and help them.

I think the real understanding comes when we recognize our humanity in each other. That’s not just between blacks and whites. That’s between all religions as well.

Blacks were more likely to be sentenced to prison following a conviction, but that result reflected their past crimes and the gravity of their current offense.

Blacks as a group have voted Democratic since the 1930s. The GOP has not courted them in any real way since the 1960s, focusing instead on attracting white constituencies hostile to civil rights and African-Americans in general.

I just remember, it seemed to be the thing to do to get up a three o’clock in the morning and watch the All Blacks play England or South Africa.

Liberals believe that they own blacks – still. They believe they’re something proprietary about being black in this country, and if you deviate from the way they want you to think, in the way they want you to act, they grow violent.

I knew being accepted was going to be hard, but I knew I was involved in a situation that was going to bring opportunities to other blacks.

The most valuable blacks are those in prison, those who have the warrior spirit, who had a sense of being African. They got for their women and children what they needed when all other avenues were closed to them.

After all we have been through, blacks and other minorities deserve to be protected, as anyone else.

Whites know never tell blacks what you really think and what you really feel because you risk being seen as a racist. And the result of that is that to a degree, we as blacks live in a bubble. Nobody tells us the truth. Nobody tells us what they would do if they were in our situation. Nobody really helps us.

There’s no doubt that Mexican men and women full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States.

While he was in the service, in the South and in Oklahoma, he was refused service at a couple of places where he was in uniform, and was told that African Americans, blacks, Negros, were not served. And in spite of that, I’ve never known a man who loved this country more than my father did.

Republicans and blacks had an unlikely alliance around ‘max black’ after the 1990 census. By concentrating black voters in some districts, the strategy elected a record number of black congressmen in 1992. But the remaining ‘bleached’ districts were more likely to elect white Republicans.

But until Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, liberal activists and conservative activists decide division is no longer the most valuable unit of currency, there will be no solutions of any kind.

I am not covering stories as a transgender reporter. I’m a reporter who is transgender. Otherwise, it would be like having a black reporter only cover stories about blacks or a Hispanic reporter covering stories about Hispanics.

Only blacks can play the race card, apparently; only they think in racial terms, at least to hear white America tell it.

My dad was such a bigot. He was a horrible, self-centred person. He was really racist and he’d talk about the Jews and blacks and Catholics even.

In Baton Rouge, blacks have always been looked at differently from other races, and the blacks who are fortunate, don’t express themselves like I do.

We Greeks are the blacks of Europe.

There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?

How long must the American community afford special treatment to blacks?

I think that in many ways, gays are behind women and behind blacks, as far as rights go. But I always say, if you know one of us, it’s hard to hate us.

Once one understands that ‘racial tensions’ is a euphemism for a black animosity toward whites and a left-wing construct, one begins to understand why the election of a black president has had no impact on most blacks or on the left.

I’ve always felt very strongly about human rights for blacks, women, and gays. Our Constitution is about equality for all – that’s got to mean something to all of us.

The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.

So I’m in the Republican Party for the same reason I was in the Democratic Party: to make sure blacks are included, along with everyone else.

Presley is country music, white music. Jazz is black music – it was invented by the blacks in New Orleans. And I’m really a jazz singer. I was impressed with Elvis – he was the handsomest guy I ever met in my life, and a very nice person, too. But the music doesn’t impress me.

Part of what our problem as blacks in America is that we don’t claim that. Partly, you see, because of the linguistic environment in which we live.

We have a president who stole the presidency through family ties, arrogance and intimidation, employing Republican operatives to exercise the tactics of voter fraud by disenfranchising thousands of blacks, elderly Jews and other minorities.

It’s passing strange that Obama, carried to a second term by women, blacks and Latinos, chooses to give away the plumiest Cabinet and White House jobs to white dudes.

Whoever says that sanctions will only deteriorate the situations of blacks in South Africa does not know the criminal, murderous character of genocide that represents the system of apartheid.

I feel there should be blacks in every Party.

Gun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities.

It’s hard to pin down what it means to be an evangelical today. It’s been diluted quite a bit. It is a powerful voting bloc, no question, but they’re liberal as well as conservative – and they’re made of Latinos, blacks, whites.

What does it mean to be too black for Hollywood? It’s self-explanatory. Hollywood has certain kinds of blacks that they like.

We grow up in New Zealand from a young age getting up at 3am to watch the All Blacks play South Africa or England, it’s part of who we are. So to be an All Black now is amazing.

After Civil Rights, it was very awkward for whites and blacks. We didn’t know how to talk to each other.

I have lived a life that has been beautiful and painful at some moments. But I am convinced others can learn how to control a certain kind of rage that bubbles up in many Americans, particularly, but not limited to, women, blacks, and other minorities.

From the moment we were first dumped in Jamestown and had our teeth checked before getting sold off and later considered three-fifths of a human being, an abundance of ‘likability’ hasn’t been something blacks have had to stockpile. Instead, it’s been a centuries-long battle for respectability.

Projects meant living with blacks and Puerto Ricans, but that’s what we wanted. Living in the projects, we’ve met so many wonderful, wonderful people.

A’Lelia Walker did not subsidize specific writers, but she provided a place for all kinds of people to gather. She was one of the few blacks who had the money to allow her to entertain in the large scale.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.

I’m so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.

Yeah, I make fun of blacks, and why not? I’m not a black.

Baldwin gave expression to the longings of blacks in exalted prose. He was embraced, in the tradition of Negro Firsterism, even by those who never sat down with a book, as our preeminent literary spokesman, whether he liked it or not. Neither athlete nor entertainer, but nevertheless a star.

Gays are the molecular opposites of blacks.

We all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. We’re in a relay race, relying on the financial and human capital of our parents and grandparents. Blacks were shackled for the early part of that relay race, and although many of the fetters have come off, whites have developed a huge lead.

Blacks on prime-time TV are only portrayed as comedians – and often in no better a light than ‘Amos & Andy.’

I don’t for a moment believe that women have suffered the same kind of injustices that blacks have – women have never been enslaved. But still, many of the psychological and economic problems are the same.

Whitey is uptight about offending blacks without really knowing what offends blacks.

I like suits that are fitted. And I usually stick to grays, whites, and blacks.

Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It’s very clear.

Blacks who lack a proper killing rage are merely victims.

Given the historical power differential between blacks and whites, blacks are required to be attentive to the way their white counterparts see themselves in relation to people of color if they want to survive and even thrive.

Few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks.

I never ceased to be surprised when southern whites, at their homes or clubs, told racial jokes and spoke so derogatorily of blacks while longtime servants, for whom they quite clearly had some affection, were well within earshot.

Blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. If I had put all of my police officers on Park Avenue and none in Harlem, thousands and thousands more blacks would’ve been killed during the eight years that I was mayor.

You hear blacks are good in sports and good singers. But you don’t hear about black lawyers or black politicians. I learned things later, but went through some hurt before I learned – before I had a better picture of black people and a better understanding of myself.

Me and Johnny Rotten have been talking about doing a movie of his book, No Irish, No Dogs, No Blacks. We have a script, so hopefully that’s going to happen at some point in our careers.

As a filmmaker, deep blacks are essential, and in my experience, no technology captures those attributes as well as Plasma.

There remains a degree of anti-black intellectualism in entertainment. Middle and upper-middle class blacks have often been portrayed as buffoons in popular culture; witness the characters of Carlton Banks on ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ and Braxton P. Hartnabrig on ‘The Jamie Foxx Show.’

You don’t actually have control of the position people want you to be in. If they say, ‘You king of the blacks,’ you’re king of the blacks – whether you like it or not.

My daddy wanted me to be a farmer; feel the smoothness of Alabama clay and become one of the first blacks in my town to own land. But, I was worried about my history being caked with that southern clay, and I subscribed to a different kind of teaching and learning in my bones and in my spirit.

So much of what blacks and women contend with is centered in how we view, and how the world views, our bodies. Gestures, voices, affect.

While the old spiritual ‘Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last’ was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it’s at the bottom. It’s the people who are in school systems that don’t educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit.

On the ‘Blacks & Browns’ record, it’s me and Sad Boy. He’s a Hispanic artist, and we’re talking about what we got going on with our peoples.

After the Civil War, when blacks fought along whites to secure freedom for all, southern states enacted Black Codes, laws that restricted the civil rights and liberties of blacks. Central to the enforcement of these laws were the stiff penalties for blacks possessing firearms.

‘Blacks were too scared to do anything, but they came out to greet James Meredith’: That would have been the story in the evening news if I hadn’t gotten myself shot. I got shot, and that allowed the movement protest thing to take over then and do their thing.

Unless young blacks are brought into the mainstream of economic life, they will continue to be on the curbstone.

Every ghetto you go to, Latinos and blacks are the two people that are together. We don’t look at each other in any different way, like ‘He’s black; I’m Latino.’ I look at us as one.

Martin Luther King fought for blacks, and democratic whites were with him.

The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.

Let’s be very clear: Living ‘unforgiven’ is not the sole domain of blacks. It can be found in any successful person.

Jim Crow laws stripped blacks of basic rights. Despite landmark civil rights laws, many public schools were still segregated, blacks still faced barriers to voting, and violence by white racists continued. Such open racism is mostly gone in America, but covert racism is alive and well.

It would be ridiculous for me to say anything negative regarding blacks having an equal opportunity on TV.

Free markets, hard work, and morality will benefit blacks and all Americans.

As a result of America’s efforts to realize the ideals of equality and freedom, blacks in America are now the freest and richest black people anywhere on the face of the earth including all of the nations that are ruled by blacks.

It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.

Blacks should feel fortunate to be citizens of this country. We are blessed, not enslaved, and those who say otherwise are enslaved only by their own hatred.

I have no desire to take all black people back to Africa; there are blacks who are no good here and will likewise be no good there.

Blacks had a huge role in settling the West, but you’d never know it from Western movies.

The savage repression of blacks, which can be estimated by reading the obituary columns of the nation’s dailies, Fred Hampton, etc., has not failed to register on the black inmates.

We are viewed by the world as a quasi-racist state in which we allow natural disasters to obliterate our minority community, in which our penal system is designed to treat blacks unfairly, and in which we let the medical and educational systems in our ghettos fester to the level of some third-world countries.

No one can compare us to the apartheid regime. It’s not like in South Africa between the blacks and the whites who belong to the same nation, or in Berlin where you find parents living on the eastern side and their children in the western side.

For people of color – especially African Americans – the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware.

Our vulnerability is that both blacks and whites can use our impossible racial authenticity against us. Both races can throw up our mixed background to challenge our authority to speak.

You know, I love all kinds of activism. I certainly think blacks deserve to have something whether it is affirmative action or an opportunity that should be opened up to them. But at the same time I believe that people of color are not the only poor people in America and all over the world.

Blacks, especially in America, have been raised with a slave mentality – they don’t feel that they have the right to speak as loud as possible.

I then realized that I could never be satisfied again with the mere natural charm of my voice, that I had to constantly paint when singing, melting all the colors, expressing reds and blacks that had to be less primary but bursting with subtly colored combinations.

For the better part of two centuries, outsiders have been offering explanations that range from racist to learned-sounding – the supposed inferiority of blacks, the heritage of slavery, overpopulation – for why Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Blacks as a group will never be equal while they have this situation going on, where the vast majority of children do not have fathers in the home married to their mother, involved in their lives, investing in them, investing in the next generation.

My biggest false steps have actually been when I tried to do very different projects. I found I was getting people saying, ‘Why does Whit Stillman think he can do a film about blacks in early ’60s Jamaica? Or the Chinese and the cultural revolution?’ Those were the two biggest failures I had getting off the ground.

We know that all interracial groups in South Africa are relationships in which whites are superior, blacks inferior. So as a prelude, whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior.

I’m really busted up over this and I’m very, very sorry to those people in the audience, the blacks, the Hispanics, whites – everyone that was there that took the brunt of that anger and hate and rage and how it came through.

Every day of my life I walk with the idea that I am black, no matter how successful I am. And our success is tempered by that; you’re successful in this way given the fact you are black, and most blacks don’t get to that point.

A Black man should be more independent and depend on himself for his freedom and not to take it for granted that someone would lead him to it. The blacks are tired of standing at the touchlines to witness a game that they should be playing. They want to do things for themselves and all by themselves.

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.