Kerry James Marshall Quotes

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

Black people, we are not this monolithic group, you know?

Well who's black and what is a black person?

There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.

Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.

It would seem that some black people want to say that when you, as a black, become successful, you cease to be black. That's ridiculous.

Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness, and your black presence.

I never learned how to be adequately black. I never learned how to be black at all.

The perception of linked fate and that feeling of being always on the spot as a representative of the race, at least in mixed company, are features of African American life that predate affirmative action and arise outside of its presence.

I'm black because that's the way the world sees me.

I'm so black, I leave fingerprints on coal.

I've always had an interest in complicating the way that we perceive the black character, whether it's the black academic or scholar or activist or black intellectual.

What is blackness? Is it the way you talk? Do you got to say, 'Dey this, dey dat.' Or the way you dress? Or is it the forgiving of certain things? What is black enough?

I'm black, I don't feel burdened by it and I don't think it's a huge responsibility. It's part of who I am. It does not define me.

Regardless of what I've ever done or will ever do, I'll always be black.

I think, all too often, this society has too monolithic a definition of what a black American is.

I'm black. I've been black all my life, and as far as I know, I'll die black.

If you are born black, and you don't accept your natural status as a victim, then the validity of your blackness is immediately called into question.

There's not one black narrative. There's not one way to be black.

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.

Just call me black, if you want to call me anything.

In Atlanta, with a large African-American population, Sosa is often considered a black man. In Miami and Los Angeles, with larger Hispanic populations, he is a Latino man, and the black label is rejected as robbing Hispanics of a hero.

I don't mind being black. I'm black out loud. It's more than the people that they are, it's the condition that they represent.

I always wonder if my kids will say they're mixed or black.

There are no black conservatives. Oh, there are neoconservatives with black skin, but they lack any claim to blackness other than the biological. They have forgotten their roots.