Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

fter the O.J. Simpson trial there was talk about how the country was splitting in two - one part black, one part white. It was ludicrous: typical gringo arrogance. It's as though whites and blacks can imagine America only in terms of each other. It's mostly white arrogance, in that it places whites always at the center of the racial equation.

Just as important I believe, is Black America can look back at the show and say, "Wow, I think I now understand why a lot of white people were appalled at the acquittal of O.J. Simpson."

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to black people.

By looking upon themselves as human beings, their whiteness to them isn't the yardstick of perfection or honor or anything else. And, therefore, this creates within them an attitude that is different from the attitude of the white that you meet here in America, and it was in Mecca that I realized that white is actually an attitude more so than it's a color.

[Educated blacks] Society refuses to consider them genuine Negroes. The Negro is a savage, whereas the student is civilized. "You're us," and if anyone thinks you are a Negro he is mistaken, because you merely look like one.

There was certainly, like, a rebellious, like, youthful rage in me. And there was also the fact of no getting away from fact that I am white, and you know, this is predominantly black music, you know.

I'm one of those people who is colour blind to a certain degree. And that doesn't mean I'm not acutely aware of race in our country and abroad and in the world. I know what's going on, and I'm very aware of it.

One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings.

When I go back home now, when I go back to Nigeria now, I get off the plane in Lagos and I just don't think of race. I get on the plane and arrive in Atlanta, and immediately I'm aware of race.

I'm a white guy in a black sport. I really forget about it until someone asks me about it. I'm simply competing in a sport that I love.

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.

White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

I know that I am a black man in a white world. . . I know that I never had it made.

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.

The Negro loves America enough to criticize her fundamentally. Most white Americans simply can't be bothered.

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

I know a lot about being white - because I have to, I live in the white world. A white person doesn't live in the Indian world. I have to be white every day.

To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica's black mass.

That split is inside all Americans. There are contradictions inside all of us about color and race. We've learned to cover them up and live with them and pretend that deep cleavage is not there. We all bear that illness.

'Get Out' takes on the task of exploring race in America, something that hasn't really been done within the genre since 'Night of the Living Dead' 47 years ago.

I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.

Interestingly enough, I feel what the show [OJ Simpson] was able to accomplish in a really masterful way is that White America could look back on the show and the documentary and say, "We understand why Black people were effusive at the acquittal of O.J. Simpson."

I'm not black, but there's a whole lot of times I wish I could say I'm not white.