Alice Walker Quotes

In my experience, as a young black artist, you have to fulfill an archetype, or be a token - and I was unwilling to do that.

I am held to answer for the crime of color when I was not consulted in the matter. Had I been consulted in the matter and my future fully described, I think I should have objected to being born in this gospel land.

I was a kid who liked art and theater and dance and music, but if you lived in Harlem, high culture was somewhere else, and it wasn't black.

The poor black people in it make the black people in Gone With the Wind look like Malcolm X.

I have a general feeling that writers and artists who are in this peculiar situation, of being a persecuted artist, all anyone ever asks about is the persecution. It may well be that's the last thing in the world they want to talk about. There were many years in which every journalist in the world wanted to talk to me, but nobody wanted to talk to me about my work. That felt deeply frustrating because I felt there was an attempt to stifle me as an artist. The best revenge I could have was to write.

The core of the culture is racism and how black men are viewed. They've always been demonized and seen as threats in our culture. Another holdover from slavery. We've got to deal with that core root of racism and demonization of the upbringing of black men. Black women are not exempt by any means.

I never cease to wonder at the amazing presumption of much of white society, assuming that they have the right to bargain with the Negro for his freedom.

I think this mythology - that we're all beyond race, of course our police officers aren't racist, of course our politicians don't mean any harm to people of color - this idea that we're beyond all that (so it must be something else) makes it difficult for young people as well as the grown-ups to be able to see clearly and honestly the truth of what's going on. It makes it difficult to see that the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement manifested itself in the form of mass incarceration, in the form of defunding and devaluing schools serving kids of color and all the rest.

Racial oppression of black people in America has done what neither class oppression or sexual oppression, with all their perniciousness, has ever done: destroyed an entire people and their culture.

There was always resistance and there was always a counter-narrative, but we were told all through the early twentieth century that black people in the South don't want an education, they don't want to vote, they're simple people, they don't want this, they don't want that.

I am a black new wave artist.

I decided that the whole idea of what it means to be an artist was that somehow you are ontologically oriented toward poverty : "As an artist, you don't make money." I had to figure out some kind of way to guarantee that I'd be able to continue doing the work that I wanted to do, whether I made money from the work I was doing or not.

If you read the story of slavery and see the part that the Uncle Tom played in the plantation, and then you see how the white man today has changed his tactics, but he still occupies the same position, in that same context you find Uncle Tom. He has changed his tactics but he still occupies the same position.

I think that one of the hardest things in the world to be is a black male. I mean everyone hates your guts. White men are afraid of you. White women are afraid of you. The cops hate you. The government wants you dead. Your own people want to shoot you for what you got. You just can't get over it. And even if you are able to get over it you're forced to do it on the white guy's terms.

The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the Black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that twenty-two million Black people have not risen up against their oppressors in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria and even by the democratic traditions.

How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.

Racism is so extreme and so pervasive in our American society that no black individual lives in an atmosphere of freedom.

The system of white supremacy is intended to make folks of color doubt themselves, their intelligence, their abilities, their very sanity. And so it's important to remember that folks of color know their own realities.

I teach a graduate photo seminar at Yale, and I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by the task the students set before themselves to be artists, because - it seems so quaint, but when I picked up a camera with a group of other women, I'm not gonna say it was a radical act, but we were certainly doing it in some sort of defiance of, or reaction to, a male-dominated world of painting.

When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.

It's almost impossible to separate the actions, or it's also, it's almost impossible to separate the oppression and exploitation, criminal oppression and criminal exploitation of the American negro from the color of the skin of the person who is the oppressor or the exploiter.

What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work?

I come from a family of lawyers. I was expected to be a professional of some sort, not an artist. I was never uplifted for my art.

Being called Black in America is the struggle to keep us moving and breathing over bloody water. Being a Nig**r or [Ni**a] without the context of history is like drowning in bloody water, dragging down those yet knowing to swim.

As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.