Jerry Leiber Quotes

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?

It would seem that some black people want to say that when you, as a black, become successful, you cease to be black. That's ridiculous.

Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.

I used to joke for years that I was a black man. I adopted the black culture, the black race. I married a black woman, and I had black kids. I always considered myself a 'brother.'

I'm so black, I leave fingerprints on coal.

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.

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

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

I'm not a Rachel Dolezal. I don't fake tan; I don't have the cornrows, I don't misappropriate. I just want to be Beyonce.

Aspiring black leaders are often asked to transcend race, even though no one ever asked, say, Hillary Clinton to transcend gender. This is a precarious race straddle that most members of the breakthrough generation seem to reject. Even the most well meaning white Obama supporters seem to take deep satisfaction in this idea. Obama, they insisted, could be raceless, a reasurringly optimistic view of America's deepest burden that ignores countless peices of evidence to the contrary.

As a teenager, my blackness was also questioned by some of the life choices I made that weren't considered to be 'black' choices. For example, joining the swim team when it is a known fact that 'black folk don't swim'; or choosing to become a vegetarian when blacks clearly love chicken.

Well who's black and what is a black person?

There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.

You know, I'm an African-American quarterback. That may scare a lot of people because they - they haven't seen nothing that they can compare me to.

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.

Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time.

I never learned how to be adequately black. I never learned how to be black at all.

The perception of linked fate and that feeling of being always on the spot as a representative of the race, at least in mixed company, are features of African American life that predate affirmative action and arise outside of its presence.

Your not black enough. If you are black, all you have to do is wear a dashiki and pump your fist, and you’ll get all the money you want.

To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!'

I'm black, and it's a very important part of what I am. I'm not embarrassed about it.

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

I'm black and white, so either, sometimes, you're not considered by the breakdown of the script: you're not 'black enough' for this role. Or you're not 'white enough' for this role. Or, like, looking up to people, who do I identify with? And not seeing Barbies that maybe look like me.

I'm black because I was born this way. I'm proud of it. Thank God I am who I am.

I identified with white culture, and I wanted to fit in. I didn't identify with black culture. Like, I didn't like Tyler Perry movies, and I wasn't into hip-hop music. I liked Neil Young.