Michael Kiwanuka Quotes

For Black people, we're one of the only groups of people that for some reason to express love of yourself, in some ways, is misconstrued as a dislike for someone else.

I don't consider myself just a black man. I consider myself a brotha. I love my people.

Prince is extremely soulful, but he can get real rock-'n'-rollish. So can Lenny Kravitz. Lenny's real soulful but he's got that rock with him, too. On the whole, I guess black folks ain't trying to handle rock-'n'-roll, really.

It was unlikely that anyone had ever heard a black person sing country music.

Black Poetry is not for Black People...it is for everybody

Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering "who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?"

When I was a little kid I thought I would grow up to be black and sing jazz in nightclubs.

Black people are the most talented people in the world.

I've heard that Black people and Black faces don't sell magazines, but one day you're going to beg me to be on there.

This Thursday, Barack Obama is gonna give his acceptance speech, and reportedly it's going to include performances by Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. Yeah. And they say Obama's not black enough!

When I say the n-word, black people are clear that I'm on their side. And it's not disingenuous - I am on black people's side, clearly.

Being a blues singer is like being black two times.

Looking into my future, I don't always want to be in front of the camera. I want to be behind the camera and bring to life those family members of mine or people that I knew or the kids I grew up. I want people to know the different facets of black people, brown people, all people.

I come in with this rock 'n' roll-oriented music, and it's not black enough . . . I've always had to deal with this black-white thing.

I am a tropical black man.

I'm racist against non-black people.

If all we are for is black people and white people who like black people, then I have nothing to say to Trump who is only for white people and black people who like him.

I wanted to write about voodoo tradition that I feel has been very important to survival of black people here: people of the African diaspora, people of this region, and throughout the south.

"Race." I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both "black" and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can't take them seriously.

The world has white people and black people in it. Even in Harlem.

When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.

A black Christian is like a black person with no memory.

It's a good time for black people to be alive.

I really want the sense of black people being interconnected: If you black and you from Chicago, there's a connective tissue we all have. Even if you're not blood related, that doesn't mean I can't look out for you.