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.
