Rashid Johnson Quotes

White people really deal more with God and black people with Jesus.

I was raised Catholic, and I remember in all the pamphlets and pictures we'd look at, Jesus was basically blonde with blue eyes. He kind of looked like Jared Leto.

What makes my work my own is where I'm writing from. And I feel like I have a million stories to write about Chicago.

Overall my race hasn't been a problem. I'm a Black artist with White skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what's in your own soul.

Hip-hop has globalized a conception of blackness that has had a political impact, whether or not it had a political intent.

I felt black. I was as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons. They were better musicians, they were better athletes, they were not uptight about sex, and they knew how to enjoy life better than most people.

I remember at one point being in fellowship, and everyone used to wear the fish symbol; it said you were a Christian. So I asked my father, 'Dad, why don't you wear that at work?' And he said, 'Your religion should be in your actions.' He set a great, great example.

What is blackness? Is it the way you talk? Do you got to say, 'Dey this, dey dat.' Or the way you dress? Or is it the forgiving of certain things? What is black enough?

I love living around black people. Home is home. We suffer under racism and the physical deprivations that come with that, but beneath that, we form cultures and traditions that are beautiful.

Don’t get too wrapped up in the flag because every flag is superseded by the cross.

The problem is that it’s not a bathing suit, It’s an islamist uniform. It’s one of the ways in which Islamic fundamentalism flexes its muscles.

With my face paint on, I don't look like a regular black dude.

I tried to do Kwanzaa with my family and was like, 'This sucks. What am I doing this for?' For me, I felt like I was doing it because I was trying to live up to someone else's idea of what 'black' was.

There's this responsibility you feel to present a certain thing that kind of respectability politics. I think that became the only accepted way of defining black culture. I started to become too aware of 'How does this look?' instead of 'Who are these characters?'

There is much about the shared terrain of being a black person in the United States that is not seen on small or silver screens or in museums or best-selling books, and much of what gets ignored in the mainstream thrives, and is celebrated, on Twitter.

I really just prefer to be exactly who I am, and black is really the closest race and cultural category that represents the essence of who I am.

Obviously most of the western world has an image of Jesus in their minds, [and] I'm pretty sure I don't fit that many. You always know if you take on that role, you're going to disappoint a lot of people in the process. I did my best.

There never has been a culture since this world began in which a New Testament Christian could feel at home.

Whether you interpret the Bible as literature or as the final word of whatever God may be, Christianity has given us an image of death and sexuality that we have based our culture around. A half-naked dead man hangs in most homes and around our necks, and we have just taken that for granted all of our lives.

I like when people wear a WWJD bracelet, because it's like an example of the first thing Jesus wouldn't do, probably.

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

My second Christian name is John. Good solid bourgeois Christian name, like my first name, Peter, a rock. Minerals. Build on rock, rocks, uranium. Peter and John were two of the twelve apostles - arguable the two most significant. Were my parents hedging their bets?

I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.

Michael [Jackson] reconstructed his face and deconstructed the African features into a spooky European geography of fleshly possibilities, and yet what we couldn't deny, that even as his face got whiter and whiter his music got Blacker and Blacker. His soul got more deeply rooted in the existential agony and the profound social grief that Black people are heir to.

If Jesus had been a hunchback, they could hardly have nailed him to the cross.