Rashid Johnson Quotes

I do consider myself part of black history.

In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.

The history of the black man did not begin with slavery.

Blacks in America want to forget about slavery - the stigma, the shame. If you can't be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, and that is the blues.

You can't just say in one sentence what is blackness or what is black culture or what makes you who you are.

When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent.

As Africans Americans we often think about the tragic stories associated with our lineage, but there are a lot of triumphs. Traveling helps you learn about other aspects of our history, like the story of Christ the Redeemer. It's empowering and inspiring.

I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to be faring?

I did a book in 1996, an overview of black history. In that process I became more aware of a lot of the black inventors of the 19th century.

There's no question that I'm African-American. OK? I'm a black man. We're not going to escape that.

The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.

There is no such thing as a black middle class.

The middle class is always a firm champion of equality when it concerns a class above it; but it is its inveterate foe when it concerns elevating a class below it.

We must canonize our own saints, create our own martyrs … black men and women who have made their distinct contributions to our racial history.

Typically, there's this perspective among writers - and black writers: there's this idea that there is one person - and maybe beyond writers - among blacks, there is always one person who everyone should go to learn about all things black.

My biggest inspiration is black America and what they've done in the arts. I have always felt like an outsider in America, and what black Americans have done to add their chapter to this book called the American dream, and to be so unapologetic and true, and have added so much to art and culture in the world.

When I ascended from the depths of the working class to the middle class, the higher I got, the more dishonesty I found.

All black art is always judged to illuminate our experience and prove that our stories and our history and our lives matter. And that goes back to Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston - take your pick.

I didn't learn black history in school. I had to go find Malcolm X books.

To me, Harlem is one of the most important places on the earth, particularly when it comes to talking about African Americans.

I went to a historically black college.

Every February, we reflect on and honor the achievements, struggles, and icons that comprise Black history. As a proud, Black man running for office and raising two young, Black boys in the South, I am acutely aware that I stand on the shoulders of giants.

Black youth, in general, have no understanding of our past. Young black people who don't know who Martin Luther King Jr. was, don't know nothin'.

The black experience isn't exclusively slavery/civil rights/Obama.

BET was a touchstone for me and a lot of my friends - it was a place you could go to see exactly what being black in 1992 and 1996 was like and what it was supposed to look like.