Jesmyn Ward Quotes

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.

In many ways, everything about my upbringing decreed that I wouldn't write a memoir because in the world where I grew up, in Chicago in the Fifties and Sixties, one key way of protesting ourselves - 'we' meaning black people - against racism, against its stereotypes and its insults, was to curate and narrate very carefully the story of the people.

I believe the Negro blood counts, and counts to my advantage - though it has caused me at times a life of great humiliation and sorrow.

In one sense, the stories I read betrayed me. Too few gave me back my mirror image. Fewer still spoke to, or acknowledged, the existence of the problems I faced as a black foster child from a dysfunctional and badly broken home.

Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.

There was certainly, like, a rebellious, like, youthful rage in me. And there was also the fact of no getting away from fact that I am white, and you know, this is predominantly black music, you know.

I really wanted to be born a woman. It all started there. A South American woman. And I'm upset that I was born a white Jewish male. I've been angry since.

You're a white South African, and right away you have to explain yourself. Occasionally, I get hassled until I explain my point of view. I have to make it clear that I don't live there anymore, and I don't approve of the brutal racial policies.

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society.

At screenings for 'Black in America,' I've heard people say, 'Well you know, I never thought you were black until you did Katrina, and then I thought you were black.'

The book, 'Citizen,' begins with daily encounters, little moments, places where language reveals how racism determines how we interact.

To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.

Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.

I've never seen anyone more messed up over success than Richard Pryor. For him, it's a constant battle between success in the white world and keeping it real for his black self.

You know, people'd always ask 'Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?' They never seen the house I'm running from.

White middle- and upper-class men have a longer journey to go than many people.

The black world squirms beneath the feet of the white in impotent fury or sullen hate.

We Blacks have never had a President; we’ve only had preachers.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

Much of the professed concern about the white working class is a cover for the interests of white elites who evoke working-class solidarity to combat racial, sexual and gender progress.

As a white, female, half-Jewish writer, when I read 'The Underground Railroad,' it reminded me that America isn't just the sort of Sesame Street that I grew up with that tolerated and embraced diversity in the Northeast, but in fact was built on the foundation of slavery.

James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.