Jodie Turner-Smith Quotes

The Afro-American is not a bestial race.

Sammy was the only one that looked like me, so I naturally gravitated to him. Sammy made it cool to be black at a time when, let's just say it, it wasn't very cool to be black. His name was on the front of the building in lights, and he had to go in the back. But you never saw him sweat.

My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn't until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.

The world has made being black a crime .... I hope to make it a virtue.

We [American Blacks] are a nation within a nation, looking for a nationality

I never had a moment of realization about my blackness - I just was. Blackness was a central thread of my experience as a child and as an adolescent, as it is now that I'm an adult.

The black experience isn't exclusively slavery/civil rights/Obama.

We, as black people, we have a lot of crooks.

My job is to be the constructive awakener of the black masses of the world so them know themself and others know what black people suppose to be and where.

The media's image of us is as animals, and we were never that to me. I knew love from black folks.

When you teach black people that they are less beautiful, less moral, less intelligent, and as a result you defer to the white supremacist status quo, you rationalize your accommodation to the status quo, you lose your fire, you become much more tied to producing foliage, what appears to be the case.

'Driving while black' was taught to me at a young age.

There is, for me, as a black woman, as an African woman, a sense of possibility in America that I don't feel when I'm in Europe.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

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

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

Wakanda, in short, is the Africa of black dreams.

If Asian America exists, it is because of systemic racism.

I'm from South Carolina. I'm from a real cultured state, where there's still racism daily. Still, places are segregated.

While violence is part of what it means to be part of the black diaspora in the United States, that is not all it means to be black.

I feel good being a black woman; I've always felt good.

What's 'Atlanta' about? Technically, it's about a couple guys who are friends, but to me, 'Atlanta' is about black lives. I'm getting a real look at what black life means in Atlanta.

I am part of the pan-African diaspora.

Kanye West does not represent all black people.

I view myself as a multicultural woman who happens to be black.