Lupita Nyong'o Quotes

I don't think people realize why weaves and the cultural appropriation of black hairstyles are so sensitive. It's deep-rooted. For me, it goes back to high school: I wanted to have the long, flowing hair. So I got a weave. But then I didn't want guys to put their fingers in it - you don't want them to feel your weave.

I grew up just outside New York City in a very white town. In seventh grade, I got called Macy Gray. It really affected me, so I got a weave and wore my hair straight.

I think when I first straightened my hair, I was a teenager. I don't believe that I was consciously doing it to look white or to be on television. It never crossed my mind. All of the girls in my neighborhood got perms and their hair straightened. But I know that historically it was to assimilate and there are some people who do it for that reason.

I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful.

My hair journey involved a lot of trying to figure out how to deal with my hair as a bi-racial girl in a white community living in Long Island, N.Y., where no one had a clue what to do with it.

Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde.

Fashion for my mother was about asserting and demonstrating you had aesthetics, tastes, sensibility, manners, beauty - qualities that black people were always trying to prove they possessed, because it was often assumed that we didn't.

I think for women, especially women of colour, hair has so much to do with our identity and our confidence levels. I've made a conscious choice after growing up and feeling insecure and trying to achieve this look that actually wasn't me, where I've finally stopped relaxing my hair and went back to my natural texture.

I get braids all the time. You can't tell me I'm acting black because I braid my hair. That makes no sense whatsoever.

A lot of African American women wanted to emulate white women. But I said in my mind, rationally thinking, there is no way you are going to get your hair that straight, especially in the summer.

Black women have kinky hair, and we think we have limitations on what we can do. It's interesting that people think, 'Oh this is the only thing they can do.' But if you have blonde, straight hair and don't change it for 20 years - nobody thinks about it. Nobody says anything!

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.

If the American Negro is to have a culture of his own he will have to leave America to get it.

I see other black women imitate my style, which is no style at all, but just letting our hair be itself. They call it the Afro Look.

The Negro and all things negroid had become a fad, and Harlem had become a shrine to which feverish pilgrimages were in order . . . Seventh Avenue was the gorge into which Harlem cliff dwellers crowded to promenade.

All my playmates were black. I lived in a little community called Archery (ph) in a rural area. And I didn't have any white neighbors at all. So all my kids with whom I fought and wrestled and went fishing and worked in the field and so forth were African-Americans. And that was my life. So when I got to be school age, we had to separate during the daytime, but I always felt like I was in an alien environment when I was in Plains, Georgia with white kids. I was eager to get back where I belonged with my black playmates.

My favorite author's question of all time - because it's so simple to answer ... 'Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?

Ron Karenga wrote a book back in 1968, and in that book, he said that the reason, part of his motivation for starting Kwanzaa was because he felt that Christianity was the white man religion, and he didn't like Jews, and so he made up this lie. And he called it an African holiday because he was concerned that if he didn't call it an African holiday, that black Americans would not participate in it.

The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.

We know nothing about Africa, although our roots are there in terms of our forbearers. But I mean as far as the average Negro today, he knows nothing about Africa. And I think he's got to face the fact that he is an American, his culture is basically American, and one becomes adjusted to this when he realizes what, what he is.

I tried to conform to what everyone thinks is beautiful. But my genetics gave me a curvy figure, and I've come to understand that in the Latina culture, that is beautiful.

So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.

Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal cultural progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when the Europeans arrived, as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. Hispanic is nothing more than a concession made by the U. S. legislature when they saw they couldn't get rid of us. If we won't go away, why not at least Europeanize us, make us presentable guests at the dinner table, take away our feathers and rattles and civilize us once and for all.

Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist.