Rashid Johnson Quotes

In Benin, there's a thing that family members wear the same pattern of traditional African clothing.

I am a Nubian.

I've got to where am in life not because of something I brought to the world but through something I found - the wealth of African culture.

First of all, the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.

There is no singular 'reason' why Africans use fractals, any more than a singular reason why Americans like rock music. Such enormous cultural practices just cover too much social terrain.

I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.

A lot of groups spend their whole cultural and aesthetic identity trying to move away from Africa, which I think is a mistake. One of the reasons I love Cuba and cultures like that is because they're not trying to move away from their African roots, they're trying to embrace them. That's part of the culture.

I'm trying to have Wakanda represent all of Africa.

I tried to do Kwanzaa with my family and was like, 'This sucks. What am I doing this for?' For me, I felt like I was doing it because I was trying to live up to someone else's idea of what 'black' was.

There are storytelling traditions that come from Africa that are unique from anywhere else.

As much as I'm a black person from America, I'm a black person from Africa, too.

I believe that a psychological, cultural, and philosophical migration back to Africa will solve our problem.

For the first time since I began acting, I feel that I've found my place in the world, that there's something out of my own culture which i can express and perhaps help others preserve..i have found out now that the African natives had a definite culture a long way beyond the culture of the Stone age...an integrated thing, which is still unspoiled by western influences...I think the Americans will be amazed to find how many of the modern dance steps are relics of African heritage.

I be off the slave ships, building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs

In my music, my plays, my films, I want to carry always this central idea: to be African.

The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.

We know nothing about Africa, although our roots are there in terms of our forbearers. But I mean as far as the average Negro today, he knows nothing about Africa. And I think he's got to face the fact that he is an American, his culture is basically American, and one becomes adjusted to this when he realizes what, what he is.

I'm African American / I'm African / I'm black as the moon.

Since the main problem that American, the Afro- Americans have is a lack of cultural identity. It is necessary to teach [people] that they had some type of identity, culture, civilization before they were brought here.

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

I was raised with a father who really believed in the bridge between all Africans around the world.

My roots go back to West Africa, but my last name is Kirby, which is not an African name.

There are some people who are happy to be African writers. They are pan-Africanists. I'm not a pan-Africanist. I think African countries have a lot in common. But we are also very different.

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.

My blood is Indian. I don't need tablas in my music to prove that.