Steven Biko Quotes

I am not an American; I am one of twenty-two million black people who are victims of Americanism.

A black boxer's career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.

The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.

Young black men are considered dangerous, expendable, threatening and part of a culture of criminality.

It's incredibly hard out there for women of color.

As a black woman, I have no particular interest in maintaining the status quo. Why would I? The status quo is harmful; the status quo is significantly racist and sexist and a whole bunch of other things that I think need to change.

The stark reality is that crime happens in communities of color.

My concern is what will happen to that white minority in the future because…with all our suffering, we are being hardened. The government claims that it would be committing suicide by not giving us political rights.

It's something I've constantly found shocking - all this astounding talent amongst black women that never gets to be seen or heard.

Whenever you go through the length and breadth of our country... you see a long face: you will see the long face of an African woman because she's black, because she's poor.

I know how difficult it is to be not just a woman, but a black woman, and I know how much we get attacked and our voices aren't heard. I experience it every single day.

Transgender people, especially transgender women of color, face pervasive discrimination throughout life, including by those sworn to protect us.

Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.

There is a man who exists as one of the most popular objects of leadership, legislation, and quasi-literature in the history of all men. . . . This man, that object of attention, attack, and vast activity, cannot make himself be heard, let alone understood. He has never been listened to. . . . That man is Black and alive in white America where the media of communication do not allow the delivery of his own voice, his own desires, his own rage.

Black Power alone is no more insurance against social injustice than white power.

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail.

Racism was never acceptable to the people who suffer from it.

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.

The poor black people in it make the black people in Gone With the Wind look like Malcolm X.

The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as thoroughly colonized as the people in Africa and Asia.

... black women have always found that in the social order of things we're the least likely to be believed--by anyone.

The most unprotected person in America is the black woman.

I'M HOPELESS, because I've lived long enough to expect things like this to continue to happen. I'm not surprised and at some point my little children are going to inherit the weight of being a minority and all that it entails.

I think that the over-incarceration of black and brown folk is one of the great crimes of American society.

There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.