Dick Gregory Quotes

Black people have always loved the blues - they basically created the blues.

I felt black. I was as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons. They were better musicians, they were better athletes, they were not uptight about sex, and they knew how to enjoy life better than most people.

The way black people feel, especially, is if you're going to tell a black story, let it come from a real place.

I'm not a Rachel Dolezal. I don't fake tan; I don't have the cornrows, I don't misappropriate. I just want to be Beyonce.

In 2016, the conversation of the black experience is so broad, and it's very raw. I mean, c'mon, we have a black president. That's a major thing, and there are so many other significant occurrences that have come from the '60s and '70s up to now.

You are the antithesis of a racist if you're white and you want to be black and you go out and do everything you can to identify as black, how in the world can they condemn that? That's not fraud. That's good intentions. And as we know, as we've learned, we are supposed to examine the good intentions and not the nature of the evidence.

I think when black performers performed in blackface, they were kind of taking back slave songs, but it was still a little bit iffy because they were performing, a lot of times, for white audiences who found it hilarious.

Have you heard his new song? 'Cause he thinks he's a black man now.

We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got 'em, so they can keep 'em.

While it has become “cool” for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.

When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people. May they pick me apart and take the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave the bitter bullshit rotten white parts alone.

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

I come in with this rock 'n' roll-oriented music, and it's not black enough . . . I've always had to deal with this black-white thing.

I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.

That value system has been handed right down in European society. And today when you find Negroes, if they even look like they're adopting these so-called middle-class values, standards, it's not that they are taking something from the white man, but they are probably identifying again with the level or standard that these same whites have gotten from them back during that period.

I'm admitting that I don't know that to be true, but it does sound pretty good. So a big part of my childhood was affecting black culture and black accents and black music and anything black I was into.

In the Negro melodies of America I find all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.

I am not opposed to the white race as charged by my enemies. I have no time to hate any one. All my time is devoted to the up-building and development of the Negro Race.

My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others' agony. If I could peel myself inside out I would be glad. If I could become part of the oppressed I would be free.

The blues - there's no black and white - it's the truth.

Rachel Dolezal stepped down from her position as president of an NAACP chapter after it was revealed that she was a white woman pretending to be black. Now her brother says he knew about it but she asked him not to blow her cover. Unfortunately, her cover had already been blown by God when he made her a blond-haired, blue-eyed white lady.

Blackness is an ocean, a universe, a possibility that can never be exhausted. And so we have to constantly reaffirm the necessity of excavation, of archiving and curating, but also exploring, and understanding afresh and learning for the first time what it is that we need to know, and what the limits and boundaries are, and what the themes and preoccupations should be, and what the redemptive character of that erudition is. I find myself in the exciting position of doing all that, and at the same time having the obligation to explain to white people what the deal is.

Shakespeare must be a black girl.

In New York I heard A Piece of Ground, written by a white South African, Jeremy Taylor. I modified it a little and sang it myself. That song is very special to me because it deals with the land question in southern Africa. We were dispossessed of our land.

It's hard being a white rapper sometimes! When that happens you just need to battle through.