Top 45 Blackness Quotes

No one tells every white person in this country how to be. No one tells every Hispanic, or Asian or Jewish person in this country how to be. There is no single definition of whiteness or single definition of blackness.

‘Fantastic’ is self-explanatory, you know? And the ‘Negrito’ is a way to open up blackness to everyone – you know, make it playful, international. It’s extremely positive in my view; it’s my affair with this music.

The very definition of ‘blackness’ is as broad as that of ‘whiteness,’ yet we’re seemingly always trying to find a specific, limited definition.

I am not renouncing my blackness and going on about my day. I am rejecting the legitimacy of the entire racial construct in which blackness functions as one orienting pole.

In the racialized space of capitalist gentrification, police are not only arbiters of the peace, they are the muscle of retail racism: You can only be in this space if you transcend your blackness by showing us some green dollars. Even then, there is no guarantee that green will transcend your black skin.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.

I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth.

I’m not a representative of blackness, and I’m not a healer.

I actually thought when I met Tina, my former wife, that she was White. Later I found out that she wasn’t, and she was actually very much in-tune with her Blackness.

I’m aware that if I make a country album and release it, and it gets on the Grammys, the Grammys are going to put it in the Urban category. Just my blackness automatically sets it in there.

Blackness remains the coat you can’t take off.

We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didn’t walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.

If you suffocate my blackness, you’ve got to realize that’s supremacy.

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.

I had to say to myself, ‘I haven’t written enough about blackness, yet it’s part of my consciousness and my lived experience.’ I had to get over that anxiety of ‘I haven’t done this before.’

Love as intense as ice, love as remote as blackness.

The Earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine.

Our blackness and how to survive being black in America was something that our parents instilled in us extraordinarily well.

I learned at an early age how to traverse the white world, the white-dominant world. I learned, and I was successful at it. I learned the nuances – I learned how to act, how to be – but I always was conscious and aware of my blackness.

So often, blackness is seen in a negative light.

Since I got to this country when I was 12, I’ve been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn’t have blackness if you didn’t have whiteness.

I love my blackness… I love my queerness.

In America, mixed-race identity tends to invite both curiosity and suspicion, largely because few have found a way to interrogate it without centering whiteness as the scale by which to evaluate blackness.

I think that unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn’t real, race isn’t real.

I think it’s really important that we understand the ways in which blackness plays out, right, and discrimination against black people impacts different communities in different ways but ultimately leaves them undermined and really devalued in our society.

My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn’t until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.

Sometimes, when the neighborhood is silent and the sky is aswarm with the stars and the mind is swirling like a flushed toilet, a person gets to doubting himself. In the hardest times, the stand-at-the-kitchen-sink-and-stare-into-the blackness times, I put on Bob Dylan’s ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time.’

There is a wide, yawning black infinity. In every direction, the extension is endless; the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce.

When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It’s understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor. In some places, you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive.

I embrace my blackness, just as I do my conservatism and my Christianity, but I don’t want to be defined or pigeonholed by any one of the many elements that make up my character.

A lot of white men in the music industry are promoting and participating in black culture in a way that is pretty careless. They want the currency of blackness, but they don’t want the brunt that comes along with that.

My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world.

When I was growing up, my mother used to say, ‘Don’t ever bring no nappy-head Black girl to my house.’ In the deep South in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, the shade of your Blackness was considered important. So I, unfortunately, grew up hearing that message.

What is blackness? Is it the way you talk? Do you got to say, ‘Dey this, dey dat.’ Or the way you dress? Or is it the forgiving of certain things? What is black enough?

Nobody told David Clarke what to think, what to feel, what to say, what to believe in, who to marry, what kind of food to eat – you know that thing that the race hustlers like to say defines your blackness? But yet every time I look in the mirror in the morning, I see a black guy looking back at me.

I never had a moment of realization about my blackness – I just was. Blackness was a central thread of my experience as a child and as an adolescent, as it is now that I’m an adult.

Blackness is a state of mind, and I identify with the black community. Mainly, because I realized, early on, when I walk into a room, people see a black woman, they don’t see a white woman. So out of that reason alone, I identify more with the black community.

The biggest accomplishment, in racial terms, for Barack Obama was being elected. He had to overcome his blackness to be elected. He climbed the Mt. Everest of American politics, becoming an historic first.

Of course, the opposite of white privilege is not blackness, as many of us seemed to think then; the opposite of white privilege is working to dismantle that privilege. But my particular hip-hop generation proved to be very serious about figuring it all out and staying engaged.

It was jarring to be berated for ‘acting white’ when I was placed in a predominantly black middle school in Southern California. I was also chubby, into boys who weren’t into me, and tried too hard to fit into this ‘blackness’ I was supposed to be.

I always feel like I’m warring with my womanhood and wanting the world to be better, and with my blackness – which is the opposite of whiteness.

I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.

If our culture is so often readily and easily appropriated, imagine what happens when we embrace our full blackness and know that our contributions are just as important to the shaping of the country and, more broadly, the world.

You can’t just say in one sentence what is blackness or what is black culture or what makes you who you are.

Identity is becoming more dependent on what people are willing subscribe to and less dependent on objective criteria such as skin colour or where they’re born. Ways of identifying blackness are no longer black or white. It’s not a case of us or them, you can now be us and them; like them but different.