Jidenna Quotes

A lot of groups spend their whole cultural and aesthetic identity trying to move away from Africa, which I think is a mistake. One of the reasons I love Cuba and cultures like that is because they're not trying to move away from their African roots, they're trying to embrace them. That's part of the culture.

I can't be calm when I drive through sections of Atlanta that look more like Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, than America.

I've got to where am in life not because of something I brought to the world but through something I found - the wealth of African culture.

My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.

Black culture is a fight. We want to hold on to what we are, but sometimes the things that we are can be totally negative. You have to think: can't we try something new and not be seen as suspect?

… people should not be hindered from attaining development in accordance with their own culture.

As a youngster, my parents made me aware that all that was from the African Diaspora belonged to me. So I came in with Caribbean music, African music, Latin music, gospel music and blues.

The one thing I won't do is sacrifice my Indian identity in my music, my clothing choices. It's something I tried to hide growing up, and I would never do that again because it's such a big part of me and I'm very proud of it.

Taiwan has been so well developed economically. But we are underdeveloped culturally.

I'm looking forward to it, to be able to represent the black culture... but I'm doing my best at managing it, keeping it behind me, and that's the best thing I can do.

The history of blackness is also a history of erasure.

Until black culture as a whole is effectively disentangled from the python-grip of hip-hop, and by extension the street, we are not going to see any real progress.

I don't think I've ever spoken to anyone who's told me that the story of 'Roots' isn't important.

The stories I always see about a first-generation kid trying to erase where they came from, or trying to just be white, I would watch those shows or movies and I was like, 'I don't get this.' This isn't how I feel.

I be off the slave ships, building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs

It's depressing to see blacks wanting to dive into the mainstream of American commercial life. They come from a magnificent African culture based on aesthetics, and they all want to become fort builders like the vicious people who originally enslaved them.

If we are to reclaim our culture, we cannot afford narrow definitions.

There has been a struggle to reclaim the African self. That struggle has been on the part of a minority of dedicated African-Americans who never gave up our African identity at no time during our stay here.

One of the upsides of tourism is that people begin to take themselves a little more seriously (and think their) culture is worth something. So rather than disparaging the local culture, they vitalize it.

We have to realize our black heritage in order to give us strength to move on and progress. But as far as returning to the old African culture, it's unnecessary and it's not advantageous in many respects. We believe that culture itself will not liberate us. We're going to need some stronger stuff.

A lot of native culture has been destroyed. So you already feel lost inside your culture. And then you add up feeling lost and insignificant inside the larger culture. So you end up feeling lost squared. And to never be recognized, to never have any power, you know, other minority communities actually have a lot of economic, cultural power.

Native people such as the Cherokees are just as human and complex and real as Americans are, and our nation needs to respect American Indian cultures and traditions.

Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal cultural progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when the Europeans arrived, as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. Hispanic is nothing more than a concession made by the U. S. legislature when they saw they couldn't get rid of us. If we won't go away, why not at least Europeanize us, make us presentable guests at the dinner table, take away our feathers and rattles and civilize us once and for all.

I don't think the American government has a lot of respect for culture.

We cannot abandon this rabbit hole for fear of a traumatic encounter with our own culture.