Lupita Nyong'o Quotes

Black people in America have come from slavery to other forms of being oppressed and there are some things that come with that - some pain and anger that come with that and we as black people have to deal with it to heal that. White people have to understand it and have some compassion toward it.

White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations.

In this room we're all here together, but there's probably a lot of different views, people sitting here thinking, I don't own any slaves, all the slaves are dead. Why am I responsible? My family were immigrants, too.

America is haunted by an apparition steeped in slavery, and I wanted to remind everyone that, 'Yo, we've got to handle this.'

That happens to a lot of couples. I understand the black history in this country, and regret it, I wish it hadn't happened. See, I also know that it hasn't happened to African-Americans alive today. There isn't one African-American alive today who's treated as three-fifths of a person like it was in the past.

Well, the white race in America is the same way. As individuals it is impossible for them to escape the collective crime committed against the Negroes in this country, collectively.

If anything is life-changing, being the descendant of a slave is.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

There are, after all, between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand descendants of the Ball-family slaves. If I were to begin apologizing to every one of these families, it would quickly become a meaningless act.

Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld.

'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.

There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

Your race has suffered the greatest wrong that has ever been inflicted on any continent.

We are still living with the ships of the Atlantic slave trade. They are ghost ships that influenced much of what we are today.

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA‘s first African-American President.

With 'Underground,' we see that the wounds that we all, as a nation, inflicted upon our brothers and sisters during slavery have not been healed.

The Holocaust of Nazi Germany is certainly no less of a historic crime than the Holocaust that went on for centuries against African-Americans. That process of reparations, and a truth and reconciliation discussion, was extremely helpful in the country of Germany, and we need to have that here.

Our people historically have gone through a lot. That is our story. You can trace it all the way back to slavery. But it is incumbent upon everyone, no matter what field, to make it easier on the next generation.

When we're talking about slavery... we're really talking about the web of relationships that exists between whites and blacks from 1619 to 1865 to now.

If you feel like the beginning of your history is rooted in slavery, that really, I think, messes with your sense of self, your self-esteem, and your self-worth.

I am the descendant of slaves, of people that were born from a slave and a slave master.

When I went to Harvard Law School, my first year, I didn't want people to know I started my education in a colored school. I didn't want them to know I was the great-grandson of enslaved people. I thought it might diminish me.

Our long memories hold the stories of what our people accomplished, but they also hold the prejudices, the injustices, the harm that we've received from others.

The harsh fact of the matter is that this nation has not remotely come to grips with how many of its laws are rooted in slavery and bigoted oppression. After the Civil War, the United States never said, 'Let's examine every law and policy and system and structure we have to evaluate whether or not they were created as a tools of oppression.'

Black people are experiencing a systemic disadvantage, and it goes back to slavery, which was not that long ago.