Solange Knowles Quotes

In Australia, there just weren't strong roles for actors of colour. I was often being asked to turn up for commercials with a ghetto blaster on my shoulder. I thought, 'Are we in the '60s?'

There's always been a quiet conversation and joke that if you're not hard, if you're not from impoverished neighborhoods, if you're not certain constructs of a black stereotype, then you not black.

Each one of my movies is going to be about one of these different social demons. The first one, being 'Get Out,' is about race and neglect and marginalization.

Being the house ethnic was destroying my life and my sense of myself, because I had been consigned to play every dusky maiden you have ever seen in your life in movies.

There is this feeling among black artists that you have to be really careful. We're not inclined to talk about this stuff because, if we do, we put ourselves in a position where we're not marketable or where we can't win.

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.

I think that show will go down in history... people will scratch their heads and say 'How did this ever get on the air?' I mean, they finally have a planet that's populated with a black race and then they present them as savage warriors, and the men want the white girl!

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong.

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.'

When you're told that as a filmmaker of colour, the stories you want to tell aren't commercial enough, then you start thinking, 'I'm going to tell them anyway.'

Whatever that thing is that white people like in blacks, I don't have it. Maybe it's my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don't have it.

So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.

White people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet.

It is hard for a black man to just be himself. We spend so much time in defense of something that is indefensible because there is nothing to defend.

People of color have a constant frustration of not being represented, or being misrepresented, and these images go around the world.

We don't know anything about racism. We've never experienced it. If words can make a difference in your life for seven minutes, how would it affect you if you heard this every day of your life?

What does it mean to be too black for Hollywood? It's self-explanatory. Hollywood has certain kinds of blacks that they like.

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.

When you educate a negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.

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.

Barack Obama is an educated fool. He is viewed as the white man in blackface in the community.

If you are a black athlete, celebrity or media personality living, socializing, working, studying or dating in the white community, the easiest way to stop Twitter trolls from spamming your social media with accusations of race betrayal is to celebrate BLM. If you’re an educated, nerdy, proper-speaking black person who has been chastised for “acting white” by your black peers, supporting BLM salvages your black image.

Back when we was in school in Mississippi, we had Little Black Sambo. That's what you learned: Anytime something was not good, or anytime something was bad in some kinda way, it had to be called black. Like, you had Black Monday, Black Friday, black sheep... Of course, everything else, all the good stuff, is white. White Christmas and such.

I always feel like I'm warring with my womanhood and wanting the world to be better, and with my blackness - which is the opposite of whiteness.