Charles Mingus Quotes

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!

I didn't realize, when I decided to be a comic, that a black person had never been allowed to stand flat-footed in America and talk to white folks. It never happened before.

I am not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American, and got sense enough to know it. I am one of the 22 million black victims of the Democrats, and one of the 22 million black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism... You and I have never seen democracy; all we've seen is hypocracy... If you go to jail, so what? If you're black, you were born in jail. If you're black, you were born in jail, in the North as well as the South. Stop talking about the South. Long as you south of the Canadian border, you're south.

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

My dream was I was going to be an actor. Racism occurred to me. It dawned on me that I would not be an actor. It occurred to me that I was not white. It occurred to me that being what they call colored, being a Negro, was some kind of a disadvantage.

He [liberal white person] may stand with you through thin, but not thick; when the chips are down, you'll find that as fixed in him as his bone structure is his sometimes subconscious conviction that he's better than anybody black.

When you're white, the sky's the limit. When you're black, the limit's the sky.

I'm not black, but there's a whole lot of times I wish I could say I'm not white.

Every day of my life I walk with the idea I am black no matter how successful I am.

A white man killed the mules and our cows that knocked us right back down. And things got so tough then I began to wish I was white.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Race I've been studying since I knew there was a problem with race and that I was Black and something was wrong. Gender, is very new to me. All I can say is this is something that I'm going to take hold of and pray about it.

Let me just say, at once: I am not now nor have I ever been a white man. And, leaving aside the joys of unearned privilege, this leaves me feeling pretty good.

I was very young at the time, and I mainly appreciated their vocal qualities, even though I was already living as they did - as black performers in a white world.

Like a lot of black people, I grew up straight po'. Wasn't no question about whether we was po', either. If you really wanted to know, all you had to do was look in our refrigerator.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

Every day in America, African Americans are reminded of their race in ways large and small. Every day.

I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother's employer's family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home.

Me being dark-skinned, that was like a big thing. Growing up, I hated myself. It was, like, weird. Kids are cruel.

I'm a multi-racial person - I'm black and white - and growing up in North Carolina, I've dealt with a lot of racism. Growing up as a kid, I've seen it. I've been through it in many forms and fashions.

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.

We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that.

In 2016, the conversation of the black experience is so broad, and it's very raw. I mean, c'mon, we have a black president. That's a major thing, and there are so many other significant occurrences that have come from the '60s and '70s up to now.