Mahershala Ali Quotes

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

It doesn't do good to open doors for someone who doesn't have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.

I think race has been a burden for black Americans. Being Muslim has also been a challenge because so many people do not understand Islam.

It's hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once - when I was poor.

My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.

I don't feel uncomfortable in America, but every once in a while, I'm reminded that people don't see me the way I see me. It doesn't change my life, but it gives me a consciousness about it.

I was Catholic. You talk about a minority within a minority within a minority: a black Catholic in Savannah, GA.

I'm an African American.

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.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

... if the United States is indeed the great melting pot, the Negro either didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.

The cultural barriers and social and economic differences separating the Africans and African-Americans is sometimes the cause of a simmering hostility and misunderstanding between them. Sharing the common physical characteristic of skin color has not ensured cultural and economic unity between African immigrants and American-born blacks.

The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable.

Some Muslim students experience secularism as an act of aggression.

I think that, for so much of our matriculation through American society, black people sort of feel like outsiders.

I didn't get targeted in high school for being a Muslim - it wasn't that - but I always felt like an outsider in that sense.

I don't think it's different to be a black girl in England than it is to be a black girl from America. We all collectively share in a pain of displacement and not feeling like we quite belong in places.

I can't be in an environment that is not conducive to me as a black woman.

I grew up in a small town in a low-income family and was the only black kid in my elementary school. I felt like an outsider, and since I didn't know of LGBT people - much less LGBT black women - living happy, healthy, and successful lives, I didn't believe I could ever marry or have a child.

Asian-Americans are still regarded as 'other' by many of their fellow-citizens.

My kids are the reason I continue to strive for something better. They know - as kids who are Muslim, Somali, black Americans - that they've always been part of a struggle and that change isn't easy.

Black folks tell their kids they have to be twice as good as a white person? Well, if I tell a child of mine that, or that they have to be careful - that this is what a cop would do if you do this - they think something is wrong with them. I tell them death is better.

If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.

To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good. To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.

No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the … victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver - no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.