black Quotes

“He did have really cute hair. Really, really… It was completely straight and almost completely black, which, on Park, seemed like a lifestyle choice. He always wore black, practically head to toe.”

“What they were seeing was black.”

” We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table - er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.”

“Even took that kind of work from the white boys, because they would do it so much cheaper than the white boys would. Anything not to work alongside the niggers.”

“So each time a male child is born, they hope he will be the one to change this vicious circle—which he never does. Because even though he wants to change it, and maybe even tries to change it, it is too heavy a burden because of all the others who have run away and left their burdens behind.”

“I teach because it is the only thing that an educated black man can do in the South today. I don’t like it; I hate it.”

“The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian--our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in outer terrains.”

“Mommy’s contradictions crashed and slammed against one another like bumper cars at Coney Island. White folks, she felt, were implicitly evil toward blacks, yet she forced us to go to white schools to get the best education. Blacks could be trusted more, but anything involving blacks was probably slightly substandard. She disliked people with money yet was in constant need of it. She couldn’t stand racists of either color.”

“Mommy, after all, did not really look like me. In fact, she didn’t look like Richie, or David—or any of her children for that matter. We were all clearly black, of various shades of brown, some light brown, some medium brown, some very light-skinned, and all of us had curly hair. Mommy was by her own definition, “light-skinned,” a statement which I had initially accepted as fact but at some point later decided was not true.”

“There was no turning back after my mother died. I stayed on the black side because that was the only place I could stay. The few problems I had with black folks were nothing compared to the grief white folks dished out. With whites it was no question. You weren’t accepted to be with a black man and that was that.”

“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

“No; he did not think they would suspect him of anything. He was black. Again he felt the roll of crisp bills in his pocket; if things went wrong he could always run away. He wondered how much money was in the roll; he had not even counted it. He would see when he got to Bessie’s. No; he need not be afraid. He felt the gun nestling close to his skin. That gun could always make folks stand away and think twice before bothering him.”

“I just work. I’m black. I work and I don’t bother nobody.”

“To Bigger and his kind, white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark.”

″ I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.”

“I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. ”

“The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.”

“Black and white and grey, all the shades of truth.”

″ When you make the choice to come to America, you become black. ”

“I can’t believe it. My president is black like me. ”

“In one sense, we were huddled in there, bonded togethher in seeking security and warmth and comfort from each other, and we didn’t know it. All of us—who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries—were, instead, black victims of the white man’s American social system.”

“Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t ‘black’ in your country? You’re in America now.”

“One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

“We should hope not for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond to each other with love. That was King’s dream—a society that is capable of seeing each of us, as we are, with love. That is a goal worth fighting for.”

“There is no inconsistency whatsoever between the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land and the exis­tence of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness. The current sys­tem of control depends on black exceptionalism; it is not disproved or undermined by it.”

“Black Sheep, Black Sheep what do you see?”

“I didn’t ask what kind of things hide behind black trees in the middle of the night. When you go owling you have to be brave.”

“Of all the wishes people had brought him - money, love, revenge - this seemed to him the most poignant and the one most deserving of fulfillment. A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.”

“She got out of bed to dress for the spell party. She put on her black stockings, her big black shoes, her long black cloak and her tall black hat.”

″‘You can’t be Peter Pan,’ whispered Natalie. ‘He isn’t black.’ But Grace kept her hand up.”

“Slinky Malinki was blacker than black, a stalking and lurking adventurous cat.”

“And they flew like blackbirds over the fields. Black, shiny wings flappin against the blue up there.”

“Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sorry had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon.”

“A woman in an ugly black dress stood before them. ‘I am your new teacher, Miss Viola Swamp.’ And she rapped the desk with her ruler. ‘Where is Miss Nelson?’ asked the kids. ‘Never mind that!’ snapped Miss Swamp. ‘Open those arithmetic books!’ Miss Nelson’s kids did as they were told.”

“But just as he was about to leave, he saw another one all black and white and it seemed just as pretty as the first. So he took this one also.”

“The convicts working the mines were almost all like him. Black, once slave, once free, now slave again.”

“Everything about the school was dark and shadowy. There were long, narrow corridors and winding staircases- and of course there were the girls themselves, dressed in black gymslips, black stockings, black hob-nailed boots, grey shirts and black-and-grey ties. Even their summer dresses were black-and-grey checked.”

“Every black person in the South knows it’s true. Dead, living, no matter. Both worlds are close. Spirits aren’t gone.”

“Maleeka, your skin is pretty. Like a blue-black sky after it’s rained and rained.”

“Then John-John started singing his song. ‘Maleeka, Maleeka, we sure want to keep her but she so black, we just can’t see her.‘”

“He’s my color, but since second grade he’s been teasing me about being too black. Last year, when I thought things couldn’t get no worse, he came up with this here song.”

″‘Possibly you were responding to unconscious stereotypes of black men as large, threatening, dangerous?’ ‘No. I acted with just cause.‘”

“I was the same man, whether white or black. Yet when I was white, I received the brotherly-love smiles and the privileges from whites and the hate stares or obsequiousness from the Negroes. And when I was a Negro, the whites judged me fit for the junk heap, while the Negroes treated me with great warmth.”

“Charlotte was used to all the marks of war: the shabbiness of things, bad food, shop queues, posters about the war effort, people with worried faces, people dressed in black.”

“His family combed and brushed him lovingly, and he became once again a white dog with black spots.”

“Her table was usually set with only white and black- milk and dark bread, of which there was no shortage- and sometimes there was broiled bacon and an egg or two-”

“They were all red. Only one of them was as black as a mussel shell. He swam faster than his brothers and sisters. His name was Swimmy.”

“Harry was a white dog with black spots who liked everything, except...getting a bath”

“In fact, he changed from a white dog with black spots to a black dog with white spots”

“As everyone knows, if the first butterfly you see is yellow the summer will be a happy one. If it is white then you will just have a quiet summer. Black and brown butterflies should never be talked about- they are much too sad.”

“If you fly hundreds and hundreds of miles up into the sky you come to where it isn’t blue anymore. It’s quite black. In the daytime, too.”

“In white America, prisons are good places where bad men pay for their crimes. In black America, they are too often used as warehouses to keep minorities off the streets.”