Glenn Ligon Quotes

You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.

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

I love being black in America, and especially being black in Hollywood.

The history of ideas is littered with the corpses of those who have tried to define culture.

Some Indians will come up and say that a story reminded them of something very specific to their experience. Which may or may not be the case for non-Indians.

The African-American experience is one of the most important threads in the American tapestry.

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture.

My experience of Chinese culture is indirect, through echoes. When I approach the cashier at my local Chinese supermarket, they switch to English before I've even said a word. They somehow know that I'm not quite Chinese enough.

The one thing I've learned, getting out to all those foreign and domestic locales, is that people in every country of the 'civilized' world wish - either secretly or openly - that they had the expressiveness, the flair, the I'm-so-glad-to-be-me spirit that black folks have made a part of American life.

When I was going to school, I just wanted to be like everybody else. I would pull at my hair to try and get it to lie straight. America was where I would consume and absorb black culture, buy Ultra Sheen and watch 'Soul Train,' but I still had that weird in-between thing.

I think people respond to truth. 'Straight Outta Compton' made $60 million over the weekend, right? That's not just a black audience. 'Empire' grew every single week. That's not just a black audience. Black culture is American culture, you know what I mean? They're becoming more and more one in the same.

The music I like or the football teams I like or the food I eat has nothing to do with me being black.

I always feel like people misunderstand the difference between an Asian story and an Asian-American story. That's completely different, too. I have friends who grew up in Asia, and our experiences are so different. Even though we might look the same, I feel like being Asian and then being Asian-American is completely different.

Yoga is not Indian; it does not belong to India.

You can try to justify how Asian you are, but you're never going to make everybody happy.

I've never claimed myself to be a particularly Asian R&B singer. I'm R&B, pure and simple, regardless of my skin colour. Should that matter? I think not.

It really upsets me that the media insists on turning 'Do the Right Thing' or 'Boyz N the Hood' into 'black films.' They are American films. They may open the window on the black experience, but they had things to say to everybody. That's why they were so successful.

I think of Westernized culture as a good visual for my music.

More than anything, I'm an American kid, and my music reflects that more so than being an Asian-American. I think it's important but also something that can detrimental to your career if celebrated too much.

Zef is the underbelly of the Afrikaans culture, but it also, like, is Afrikaans culture.

I remember distinctly not seeing myself. I didn't see myself in black culture, white culture, mass culture.

Doing any kind of culture in America in which you are not trying to affirm a European aesthetic is war.

If our culture is so often readily and easily appropriated, imagine what happens when we embrace our full blackness and know that our contributions are just as important to the shaping of the country and, more broadly, the world.

I wanted to identify that the black experience is American experience.