Ray Stannard Baker Quotes

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

People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.

I love "Phenomenal Woman." The experiences she had of being African American in the U.S. - that itself is a task. I appreciate the hardships Maya Angelou went through for our generation. I'm super influenced by the black people that paved the way for us.

There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.

One must learn how to be black in America.

We [American Blacks] are a nation within a nation, looking for a nationality

I'm a black man from the South. I like my food!

My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.

I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.

The way black people feel, especially, is if you're going to tell a black story, let it come from a real place.

What's 'Atlanta' about? Technically, it's about a couple guys who are friends, but to me, 'Atlanta' is about black lives. I'm getting a real look at what black life means in Atlanta.

If you're a black person in America, it's really hard to avoid being black. And what I mean is that the reality of your cultural history, regardless of whether or not you talk about it, it's there.

When I see the black experience - there's not one, but it is specific, and you can't ignore it.

In many ways, everything about my upbringing decreed that I wouldn't write a memoir because in the world where I grew up, in Chicago in the Fifties and Sixties, one key way of protesting ourselves - 'we' meaning black people - against racism, against its stereotypes and its insults, was to curate and narrate very carefully the story of the people.

I am black, and I loved 'Django.'

In America, black is a country.

Jesse Jackson's living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture

I'm African American / I'm African / I'm black as the moon.

There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.

I wasn't an Uncle Tom and I never was gonna be.

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.

As it pertains to my black womanhood, there's just a lot of ground to cover. There's a lot of stuff to say.

As a black woman, I feel like I have a unique experience that we don't often see in media portrayals of the South.

While I might not have a specific experience that is fully American, there is still a knowledge, something that I logically understand as a black woman and a black woman who is existing in America and a black woman who is in the diaspora that are just known quantities that I think anyone can relate to who is black.

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