Jess Row Quotes

I did not know that 'poetess' was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know — yet — that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

Black males who refuse categorization are rare, for the price of visibility in the contemporary world of white supremacy is that black identity be defined in relation to the stereotype whether by embodying it or seeking to be other than it…Negative stereotypes about the nature of black masculinity continue to overdetermine the identities black males are allowed to fashion for themselves.

When you're dealing with African Americans, family is everything. Because we spend so much time talking about how one treats one's family. Telling a black person that you haven't talked to your mother in a week is probably different than it is with other races because people will look at you different.

Two of the great leaders of the past - Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass - had White fathers - who deserted them. Now Margo Jefferson, who is hard on me and the fellas, wrote in the Times that she has nocturnal, erotic fantasies about John Wayne. What's up with these feminists? Do you see these double standards these feminists have? They dream about John Wayne, but they're hard on us [Black men].

It was unlikely that anyone had ever heard a black person sing country music.

Michael Jackson was a poor black boy who grew up to be a rich white woman

Your first name's white, your second is Hispanic, and your third belongs to a black. No wonder you don't know who you are.

I think of the described dynamics as a fluid negotiation. I don't think these specific interactions can happen to the black or brown body without the white body. And there are ways in which, if you say, "Oh, this happened to me," then the white body can say, "Well, it happened to her and it has nothing to do with me." But if it says "you," that you is an apparent part of the encounter.

When you're a black superhero you can't erase the notion that you're black.

Sometimes it seems as if I have spent the first half of my life refusing to let white people define me and the second half refusing to let black people define me.

I feel like showering more than once a day or every day is such a white people thing.

If you're black, you can't just be ordinary. All successful black people are extraordinary.

There were certain expectations that were assumed of me as a young black American 20th-century - then 20th-century artist.

I don't see myself a Great Black Hope. I'm just a golfer who happens to be black and Asian. It doesn't matter whether they're white, black, brown or green.

I come in with this rock 'n' roll-oriented music, and it's not black enough . . . I've always had to deal with this black-white thing.

You know I'm not hung up on this liberating myself from the "black" man - I'm not going to try that thing.

There's an African-American professor at a noted Ivy League school who is saying there's three kinds of white people, and only one of the three different kinds is worth anything, and that they're so tiny and so small a group that you don't need to be worried.

The world has white people and black people in it. Even in Harlem.

I get offended when people say, 'So, being a white rapper...and growing up white...after being born white...' It's all I ever hear!

The problem is that America is still so racist - I guess it's hard to find another word for it ­ - that they still, the press in general and many people, perceive only white women as feminists. They think black women are black.

My experience has to be funnelled through a black experience or a white experience, or it doesn't exist, because that's how we're going to deal with the world.

You white folks have long been eating the white meat of the chicken. We Negroes are now ready for some of the white meat instead of the dark meat.

I re-read The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. It's a book every one should read, particularly Americans, as the USA is her primary focus. Her book demonstrates that white is not universal, that white is not neutral, that it has a history, which she eloquently delineates. It's not often you finish a book understanding how the world operates better than before you read it.

In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.

But when I do book signings and personal appearances, the audiences are mostly white. Growing up here, I expected that and understand it. Black audiences won't come out for a white writer for the most part. It really is just a fact of life.