Richard Wright Quotes

There are so many people who have this idea of who I am because I'm black.

The white audiences thought I was white, my features being what they are, and at every performance I'd have to take off my gloves to prove I was a spade.

I actually thought when I met Tina, my former wife, that she was White. Later I found out that she wasn't, and she was actually very much in-tune with her Blackness.

I never have a problem with being black. I have a problem with the easy association of what that means to some people.

Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to listen to Hugh Maskela instead of Carole King, just as I was expected to be a radical, not a conservative. I no longer cared to play that game ... The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds - social, economic, even ethnic - yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but that did not mean we had to think alike

We can see that the complexity we witness inside the African-American community today has always been there. Black people were just as noble and just as ignoble as anybody else.

People think I'm this angry black man walking around in a constant state of rage.

I'm a black man in America, so I'm going to be misunderstood.

There's no question that I'm African-American. OK? I'm a black man. We're not going to escape that.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

There is a multitude of experiences that make up the black experience.

People often expect that I should know a lot of things because I'm black. I don't really explain it to people, but it's like, I'm from Australia, my Mum's Aussie, and I grew up with five other Aussie brothers and sisters.

It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.

The haughty American nation ... makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a bootblack.

I got pictures of us and they would draw big red rings around us and tell what they thought of us. I got a letter said, "I have been shot three times throught the heart. I hope I see your second act." But this white man who wants to stay white, and to think for the Negro, he is not only destroying the Negro, he is destroying himself, because a house divided against itself cannot stand and that same thing applies to America.

To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.

I'm not going to play a racial game. With me, you're going to meet a guy named Shelby Steele, and you will have to get to know me as an individual. The color of my skin won't tell you anything. I think there's more and more of that in America.

The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.

The feelings, myths and prejudices about the Negro American which now seem so valid and real to some of our white contemporaries will take their place on the shelf along with the belief in witches and the notion that the earth is the center of the solar system.  Nobody knows as yet whether the future [of the race situation] is hopeless. All we know is that it can be made hopeless, if enough people choose to consider it so.

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.

I wasn't aware of Ku Klux Klan as I was aware of the widespread assumption that African-Americans were dumber than white people. I think my father believed that. I think everybody white did.

I think everyone is "racist," to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at, but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.

Imagine Americans who go to Paris. Why would you want to go where someone's going to disparage you? Why would you go anywhere where they treat you bad? Well, that's how it is for us to go to Mexico. You have to be on your guard, because I think the Mexicans are harder on the Mexicans, the Mexican-Americans. They don't see us as Mexican. I think part of it's a class issue and a color issue. We're more connected to their servants, so what are we doing staying at a nice hotel? There's a kind of shame.

I think that one of the hardest things in the world to be is a black male. I mean everyone hates your guts. White men are afraid of you. White women are afraid of you. The cops hate you. The government wants you dead. Your own people want to shoot you for what you got. You just can't get over it. And even if you are able to get over it you're forced to do it on the white guy's terms.

I think that one of the positions we have taken around the question of race, is that we already know. We know. We know. We know. And so we don't need to look at it again. And yet everybody is still upset. Everybody is still being driven by their outrageous imagination to the point of killing people because they feel that a black man in front of them is a demon, or the Incredible Hulk.