Bell Hooks Quotes

Growing up in London, with a hippie mom, I don't know that I'm most people's definition of what a black person is. I'm mixed, yes, but in the world I'm defined as black before I'm defined white. I've never been called white.

I'm black because that's the way the world sees me.

I enjoy challenging perspective - challenging ideas of what it means to be a black man.

My mixed-race background made me a broad person, able to relate to different cultures. But any woman of colour, even a mixed colour, is seen as black in America. So that's how I regard myself.

I only became an actor to get your attention, to challenge the archetype of an African American male; I can't be anything else in this lifetime than an African American man.

I'm black, I don't feel burdened by it and I don't think it's a huge responsibility. It's part of who I am. It does not define me.

The American paradigm of race requires that there be an ‘other’ - and the other is Black people. That's what makes white people, white.

Regardless of what I've ever done or will ever do, I'll always be black.

I am black, and there's no getting around that, but being black doesn't define every aspect of my life.

By the time I reached middle school, I fully identified myself not even as biracial but just as black.

We're not monolithic. What is blackness? To me, how do you define that?

As a black person, I'm used to going to places in which I might be the only black person that shows up there. This experience has an effect on the way you see yourself in the world and what it means to be black in the world.

I'm black. I've been black all my life, and as far as I know, I'll die black.

Most so-called 'black' people do not feel themselves at liberty to simply turn off or ignore their allotted racial designation, whether they would like to or not.

Black people have to define who we are, or others do it for us.

Have I had experiences by other people identifying me as black and behaving towards me as black? Yes. Just for as long as maybe somebody who was born categorised as black? No.

No black person married to a white person can speak for me!

When I walk out into the street or go to the toilet, I don't think of myself as being black. Of course, other people think of me as black when I walk into a pub. Obviously being black is a part of me.

Sometimes it seems as if I have spent the first half of my life refusing to let white people define me and the second half refusing to let black people define me.

If you're black, you can't just be ordinary. All successful black people are extraordinary.

There were certain expectations that were assumed of me as a young black American 20th-century - then 20th-century artist.

I don't see myself a Great Black Hope. I'm just a golfer who happens to be black and Asian. It doesn't matter whether they're white, black, brown or green.

We black women are the single group in the West intact. And anybody can see we're pretty shaky. We are, however (all praises), the only group that derives its identity from itself.

There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.

Part of the history of black people in the western hemisphere, in some ways, has been fleeing from this notion that they were black. So I can represent an ideal, and with that, you can demonstrate that there is nothing to be afraid of, nothing to run from, and that, in fact, a good deal of beauty that resides there.