Best 654 quotes in «african american quotes» category

Perhaps all love stories no matter how varied are essentially the same.

Planters clung to their proslavery beliefs even when there were facts to the contrary because the stakes involved in abandoning them were too high. They could not reject or even compromise their central myths, for to do so would mean condemning a whole culture as a lie...Ideologies, once constructed, have lives of their own. Any evidence which might have contradicted the planters' basic beliefs faced an a priori denial.

Race relations, when boiled down to the nitty-gritty, is about racist or prejudiced people and their relationship with, acceptance of, and welcoming of Black people. (from... How to Move Black America Forward)

Silence brings answers; you just have to listen.  So I listened.  And it’s not sounds as most people think, listening can be feelings, sights, smells.  Listening is receiving just like all the other senses; you just have to be open.” Excerpt From: Born from Weeds & Rats

Some of my Black sistas don’t know any better, so I’d like to give them some enlightening food-for-thought. Many of them are in awe when it comes to Michelle Obama. They admire and celebrate her intelligence and beauty. For many Black women, she’s a positive and powerful role model. Our former First Lady is phenomenal to say the least! She’s a lawyer, writer, and she fearlessly wears many other hats with integrity and grace. But, here’s what I’d like to point out: If you can admire and celebrate her, why can’t you do the same for YOUR family and friends? Why is it that when people that you personally know obtain degrees, start a successful business, buy a home, are financially secure, happily married, etc… Here you go hatin’ on them. Why can’t you genuinely be happy for them and share in their greatness? I encourage you to celebrate the Black women around you, too!

The Beautiful Ones I hear their voice: They call out to me. I heed their cries: They cry out to me. I harken to their plight: They look out for me everyday. I hear their suffering. The Beautiful Ones. The Lovely Ones. The Blessed Ones. My mind is one with them. My heart is one with them. My soul is one with them. The Good Lord loves them. The Good Lord adores them. The Good Lord honors them. The Good Lord protects them. The Good Lord will compensate them. He heard their cries. He witnessed their suffering. He answered their prayers. “Now they will wipe away their tears, now they will laugh, now they will rejoice. I am their portion,” says the Lord of Hosts. He declares, “You will receive double for your trouble.” He proclaims, “You will receive triple for your misery.” He affirms, “You will be fully compensated for all your pains.” Beautiful Ones, oh Beautiful Ones, how you are cherished. Beautiful Ones, oh Beautiful Ones, how you are treasured. Beautiful Ones, oh Beautiful Ones, how you are loved! More valuable are you to Yahweh than seven worlds: You are His sons, He declares it in the heavens. More prized are you to Elohim than seven skies: You are His daughters, He proclaims it in the heavens. More favoured are you to Adonai than seven suns: You are His children, He affirms it in the heavens. You are His now: Rejoice, oh Beautiful Ones, you are cherished. You are His tomorrow: Rejoice, oh Beautiful Ones, you are treasured. You are His forever. Rejoice, oh Beautiful Ones, you are loved!

The Black Church was the place where slaves could meet to pray and worship God and plan for their liberation. (from... How to Move Black America Forward)

The decision to integrate was based on the fact that Black America could save Major League Baseball. It would be the inclusion of Black baseball players that would bring life back to a dying pastime in America. (from... How to Move Black America Forward)

The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws.

The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with a firm positivity that he didn't need to waste time resenting real or imagined social constructs because he would always be ahead of them. The individual, not the people, was responsible for success or failure.

Say a white boy takes a wrong turn and comes to my hood," he once said. "Now he's in the minority––nobody wants him there, unless it's to rob his ass––and more than anything he has to think about how to protect himself, how to get out. There's no weaker situation to be in than that, and this boy isn't getting anything productive done until he's out, back among his own people. But we take a wrong turn and end up at Yale, for the first time in our lives we don't have to worry about protecting ourselves. And we were all able to get enough shit done to be accepted here––so imagine what we can do when you take all the crazy hood shit out of the equation and we can just focus on the business at hand. So what if it's annoying as hell? Instead of sitting around here bitching about it, maybe we just accept that it is what it is, and know that we have the capacity to get way more from them than they'll ever get from us.

Sentiments that glorify humanity know no racial distinction.

Silence brings answers; you just have to listen.  So I listened.  And it’s not sounds as most people think, listening can be feelings, sights, smells.  Listening is receiving just like all the other senses; you just have to be open.” Excerpt From: Marcus A. Nelson. “ Born from Weeds & Rats .” iBooks.

Spoil me differently! Spoil me with your love, honesty, and commitment. Spoil me with respect, honor, and appreciation. Spoil me with engaging conversations. Spoil me with your attentiveness. Spoil me by being kind, understanding, and genuine. Spoil me with laughter and let’s create memorable memories together. Spoil me by giving me your heart wholeheartedly. Spoil me baby, and I vow to do the same. Material things are okay, but nothing compares to knowing and feeling that you’re genuinely loved. Any man can buy a woman gifts, but it takes a special King to love his Queen properly.

...the locale did not make him think of her, nor did most things. He felt no negativity about the time they had spent together, but simply did not dwell on it much. She had been a seat filler, memorable as the smiling face of a beautiful girl in the window of a passing train, inspiring a fleeting moment of joy and promise, immediately forgotten with the opening of that day’s newspaper.

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths. I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there. I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore. These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.

The white economic and political elite often failed to recognize blacks as American, just as blacks often failed to recognize their potential for advancement outside of the limited opportunities afforded them by whites.

The world judges you by your color, the universe judges you by your deeds.

Time had taught him that whether his sins were pardoned or left unforgiven, they would remain committed. Tomorrow he would hopefully choose wiser, with a stronger measure of compassion.

...to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills one's aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime.

Was love ever easy for anyone? If less complicated, would this make it less appreciated? Perhaps love was difficult for good reason. Perhaps everything on God’s green earth was the result of a flawless plan, even that which seemed most muddled.

There were many tomorrows to be lived through his children. He could only hope that they would face them more courageously than he had, that his mistakes would serve as warning signs rather than crutches to lean on.

Was happiness (which was perhaps achieved not by getting what you wanted, but rather, by obtaining what you didn’t know you wished for until it was in hand) a hologram that would continually change appearance with the slightest shift of perspective? Or maybe happiness by definition was a temporary state of being recognizable only in hindsight. It was impossible to catch what always managed to be overrun and end up in the rear view mirror.

Was she happy? She thought – yes, reasonably so. Then again, what was happiness but the vast terrain between ecstasy and agony? Was this too small an ambition?

We all have scars. Just because mine are hidden doesn’t make them any less painful.

We fold our immigrant selves into this veneer of what we think is African American girlhood. The result is more jagged than smooth. This tension between our inherited identities and our newly adopted selves filters into our relationships with other girls and the boys we love, and how we interact with the broken places around us.

Well, listen, anger doesn't get anything done, so you have to find out: How do you make it work? That's why I was always maniacal about transforming every problem into a puzzle which I can solve. I can solve a puzzle—a problem just stresses me out.

We were all pawns easily discarded at the whims of monsters, some of whom were younger than me.

Whenever a word ''nigga'' is spoken, It's always followed by the same question, Can white people say nigger ? and the correct answer is Not really.

When he spoke of love, it was in the manner of someone who can recite a phrase in a foreign language but has no idea what it means. He only knows that it sounds pretty.

Women with dark skin are sharing selfies on social media after decades of being underrepresented in the mainstream media. From what I have observed much of the dark skin adoration on social media appears to come from us - black women. We tend to use the appreciation hashtags with our own pictures of photographs of dark skin women whom we feel are stunning. While I am loving this fierceness.. There is just one sidetone to this revolution: I feel as if we are much more appreciated if we show more skin. The timelines are filled with absolutely beautiful dark-skinned women but most sadly most of the time they are all oiled up and showing their body parts in different angles. Now, I am definitely in to art and as a model I know that this comes with the territory. But we most not forget that we are Queens.. We need to stop degrading ourselves for likes on the gram. You don't have to be naked to show the world you're beautiful. You my sister are an African Queen. I feel as if black women are only appreciated if they wear very provocative clothes or if they do naked photoshoots. To me, it's degrading and reminds me of the time that we couldn't ride the bus because we were black. Women were seen as servants. The black women that weren't servants were sex slaves. We are not objects, we are not meat and people need to stop looking at us as sex objects. BUT we need to start respecting ourselves first! A black woman is a woman first and it should not even be necessary to specify the colour but this is the society we live in and I feel like I had to share this.

Words are power. The more words you know and can recognize, use, define, understand, the more power you will have as a human being... The more language you know, the more likely it is that no one can get over on you." selection from book: Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community

You, a domesticated animal? I don’t think so. First, you could barely fit in my living room. Second, I would never insult you by thinking of or treating the Bloodstone Dragon as I would a dog or cat. I don’t want to pet you, Kya, I want to touch you, know you. That’s not the same.

You have a color of your own- Dark chocolate, You have a culture your own- Hip pop, You have a revival of your own- Harlem Renaissance, You are the spot on a ladybug that adds its beauty, You are the pupil of an eye, You are the vastness of space, You are the richness of soil, You are the sweetness of dark chocolate, You are the mystery in nature, Blessed Black chocolate, God has made You to rule the Land, that made You a slave.

Acting means living, it's all I do.

African-American communities have suffered under Democratic control. To those, I say the following: What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose?

African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 32 percent of patients treated for kidney failure, giving them a kidney failure rate that is 4.2 times greater than that of white Americans.

African American writers and artists, by the very nature of what they do, will actually enhance or bring together people in a way that might be very, very healthy.

African Americans have always known that a little bit of paranoia was healthy for us.

African-Americans have rarely been the beneficiaries of Presidential rhetorical excess.

African-Americans now 45 percent poverty in the inner cities. The education is a disaster. Jobs are essentially nonexistent.

African Americans were responsible for creating a lot of this beautiful and elaborate ironwork; we weren't just working in the cotton fields.

African American women in particular have incredible buying power. Statistically, we go to the movies more than anyone. We have made Tyler Perrys career. His films open with $25 million almost consistently.

A goal without a plan is a wish.

Ain't no sense worryin' about the things you got control over, 'cause if you got control over 'em, ain't no sense worryin'. And ain't no sense worryin' about the things you don't got control over, 'cause if you don't got control over 'em, ain't no sense worryin'.

The notion of the 'Black male predator' is so historically rooted in the American consciousness that we have come to accept the brutalization and murder of citizens by the police as an acceptable method of law enforcement. The assumption is that Black men are the bad guys, the police are the good guys, and if the police killed someone it must have been for a good reason. They must have done something.

What y'all ladies got to share? Hmmm, what you bitches got?" Aunt Georgia sighed and squinted at the boy. She said, "The Lord loves a cheerful giver, but I'm just not in the mood." The thug moved his hand from his crotch to his scalp, still scratching. "What in the hell's that supposed to mean?" Mrs. Cleveland raised and pumped her walking stick, which, it turned out, was a double-barreled shotgun. "It means take one more step," she said, "and I'll blast you to hell, you ignorant-ass bastard.

When I was a child, to call someone 'black' was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight. But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close to the soil and the sky, of plain speaking. Of The Journey.

Why is it deemed justifiable and appropriate for cops/police officers to kill other cops (friendly–fire) and citizens? Why do cops kill? Are they not taught to maim or slow down someone running or reaching for a weapon? If not, why not? Why do cops kill first and ask questions last? Why are police officers being military trained? What can we as citizens, taxpayers, and voters do to stop these killings and beatings of unarmed people? Why do we let this continue? How many more must die or get beat up before we realize something is wrong and needs to be changed? Will you, a friend, or a family member have to be killed or beaten by a cop before we realize that things have to change? Who's here to protect us from the cops when they decide to use excessive force, shoot multiple shells, and/or murder us?

Womanist religious scholars want to unearth the hidden voices in history, scripture, and the experiences of contemporary marginalized African American women to discover fragments that can create a narrative for the present and future.