Michael Dyson Quotes

We're not monolithic. What is blackness? To me, how do you define that?

I don't think there is enough understanding of how diverse black America actually is.

People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.

I am an African-American in America. That will never change. But I don't have to be defined by that.

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

I am Charles Mingus. Half-black man. Yellow man. Half-yellow. Not even yellow, nor white enough to pass for nothing but black and not too light enough to be called white.

I do consider myself part of black history.

I feel at home in a lot of places, but I am truly an African-American.

Afro-American

There is a multitude of experiences that make up the black experience.

Anyone reading contemporary poetry - especially contemporary African-American poetry - will quickly see that race is an enduring subject. What some don't realize is just how diverse the handling of that subject is. It's as diverse as blackness.

If you're a black person in America, it's really hard to avoid being black. And what I mean is that the reality of your cultural history, regardless of whether or not you talk about it, it's there.

When I see the black experience - there's not one, but it is specific, and you can't ignore it.

Some black filmmakers will say, "I don't want to be considered a black filmmaker, I'm a filmmaker." I don't think that. I'm a black woman filmmaker.

Blackness is not simply a reactionary title or identity; that is indeed the "negative" way of characterizing African American identity.

My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't end there. At least that's what I would choose to believe.

You must begin to define yourself. You must begin to define your Black heritage.

When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.

Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense.

People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.

This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.

It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the negro who creates negritude.

The best way to get to know any bunch of people is to go and listen to their music.

In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.

There's no reason why you can't say "August Wilson, playwright" even though all of my work, every single play, is about black Americans, about black American culture, about the black experience in America. I write about the black experience of men, or I write about black folks. That's who I am. In the same manner that Chekhov wrote about the Russians, I write about blacks. I couldn't do anything else. I wouldn't do anything else.