Cheo Hodari Coker Quotes

The most dangerous enemy of the Negro race.

The man does not beat your head because you got a Cadillac or because you got a Ford; he beats you because you're black!

For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.

We are born with freedom and hope, but often that's dashed because of our color. But in school, I'd already been taught that no one could tell me that you can't do something because you're black.

If you asked me why I went to jail, the easiest explanation would be to say, 'Because I'm black.'

My only crime was being born black - or being born black in Alabama.

Our blackness and how to survive being black in America was something that our parents instilled in us extraordinarily well.

Being called Black in America is the struggle to keep us moving and breathing over bloody water. Being a Nig**r or [Ni**a] without the context of history is like drowning in bloody water, dragging down those yet knowing to swim.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

I am angry about the world's conditions for black people.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.

It's a struggle for every young Black man. You know how it is, only God can judge us.

Blacks who lack a proper killing rage are merely victims.

One must learn how to be black in America.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

Thought the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resisted at every step of his progress.

Our ears are saluted from the east and west, north and south alike saying: I like a Negro in his place. But there are no two communities which agree as to his proper place. So they have been trying to fix him in first one place and then in another; but just as soon as public sentiment changed, or he saw an opportunity, he changed to such places as he thought his intelligence, industry, courage and endurance commanded.

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes

I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

With George Bush's policies, I could make an argument for how they affect black people in a negative way. You know what I mean? But I wouldn't argue that he's a white supremacist.

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world.

I had to go to England to really learn about American racism in a way that corroborated my reality. That was critical.