American history and the black experience are inextricable. And both are inextricable from policing. Far more often than not, that’s been a good thing.
I’m always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else’s contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we’re demons.
I’m working to create a space where it feels easy to include and imagine black girls and make black girls like me the main characters of our lives.
‘Children of Blood and Bone’ is basically ‘Black Panther’ with magic.
Since most scientists are just a bit religious, and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific, we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole, while his religious intellect believes in them outside it.
The hope, the hope that lives in the breast of the black American, is just so tremendous that it overwhelms me sometimes.
What I really resent most about people sticking labels on you is that it cuts off all the other elements of what you are because it can only deal with black and white; the cartoon.
My work is often a therapy for myself – a working out of these issues as a black woman. And a way of allowing other black women to work through this kind of stigmatization as they look through the images and feel how distorted or contorted they might be in the public eye.
The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
I don’t particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where you make everything into a black box – simplify it.
Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.
If you’re a black conservative and you criticize the black community, you’re an Uncle Tom. If you’re a white conservative and you criticize the black community, you’re somehow a racist.
In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.
The black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.
As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future. But I have never, ever, in all my years seen a leader so committed to delivering that better future to America’s children as Hillary Clinton.
We must begin to tell black women’s stories because, without them, we cannot tell the story of black men, white men, white women, or anyone else in this country. The story of black women is critical because those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.
My martial arts came a lot from my uncle, who actually taught martial arts through the military. He was a black belt in tae kwon do, but also, he used a lot of military-style fighting where it’s not the high kicks or anything like that. It’s basically defeat your opponent as fast as possible.
I was the only punk rocker at my high school. And there were at least a handful of black kids who liked hip-hop. Both were kind of the new music of the day, and it was lonely being the only punk.
If you are born black, and you don’t accept your natural status as a victim, then the validity of your blackness is immediately called into question.
Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.
One of the most challenging things for me to do was to walk away from ‘Black Panther.’
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
A black belt is what you prove to be, but also what it means in your heart.
We buy the most expensive grain available growing on the best part of Russian land called black soil. We also play close attention to the purity of the water – we get it from Lake Ladoga. We store it ourselves to specific conditions. We carefully manage distillation at my distillery in Moscow.
There has always been a conscious effort to destroy any upliftment of the black race, whether that be physically, mentally, psychologically, morally, culturally, or economically.
If I were a black liberal, I would be hailed, I guess. But I’m not. I mean, I think for myself. I want to make my own decisions.
We’re not thought of in terms of color because we are entertainers. We are there to entertain you not because we are black, white, pink, or green or gay or straight or because we are Catholic or Protestant.
Black women I’m talking to you, because it’s not white women, it’s not Latino, it’s not Native American – I checked, it’s y’all. The self hate is ridiculous. Why do you hate yourself so much, why do you hate your texture, why do you hate your culture, why do you hate your history?
Black Lives Matter is not just concerned with what happens in policing. The disregard, the disrespect, and the lack of dignity for black life transcends through the fabric of our society.
Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.
I have very little fashion sense, and to tell you the truth, I give it very little thought. I dress to be as comfortable as I possibly can. Most of my clothing is either black, grey, or dark blue, and I don’t really wear a lot of colours. But I do like jackets. I have a little bit of an obsession with them.
I was the first black director on ‘Dallas.’ I drove my car into the studio lot and the guard asked me who I was delivering to.
