Amiri Baraka Quotes

It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.

It was very hard for me, for most of my life, to feel American, or call myself American, and that is a very complicated topic that would require a very long conversation.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

Nationality is a very curious thing. The blood is Scots and the temperament is Scots, but I am, in fact, 100% American.

We quarrel with no man for being a foreigner, but we recognize the moral right in no class of American citizens to train up their children to be foreigners, and then to claim for them all the rights, franchises, and immunities of American citizens.

I think that's what makes many Swedes jealous of immigrant groups. You have a culture, an identity, a history, something that brings you together. And what do we have? We have Midsummer's Eve and such silly things.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism…. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

My family came from Spain in 1725, and if people want to consider me Hispanic, they can, but I didn't advertise that way, and I'm an American first.

I'm still a proud Irishman, of course, but I've become an American citizen. I'm very, very proud of that.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

Yeah, I think that's sort of the American way. And it's also the Polish way, it turns out.

What makes America special is that people come here, assimilate and become American with all of the rights and responsibilities citizenship bestows.

In North America, what happens often is that they put race before nationhood. Everyone here is Hispanic-American, Chinese-American, African-American. But really, we're just North Americans of all these different descents. The only time I notice North Americans becoming national is when a war happens or a crisis happens.

I'm so proud of my Chinese ancestry, but I was born and raised in America, and I really believe in American values, our American system, our freedom, our liberties.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

I was born in the USA, which many people still find hard to believe.

California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so. May we not rely upon your sympathy and assistance?

Dad's Jewish and Irish, Mom's German and Scotch. I couldn't say I was anything. My last name isn't even Downey. My dad changed his name when he wanted to get into the Army and was underage. My real name is Robert Elias. I feel like I'm still looking for a home in some way.

No matter how American I become, I'm considered part of the Chinese community by my own family.

I was born here. My children were born here. What the hell do I have to do to be called an American?

They [the Americans] are a mixture of British, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race called Americans have now arisen.

We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go. At that point, we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland.

No encouragement must be given to social and political organizations or methods which perpetuate in this country foreign ideas and customs. An Irish-American, a German-American, or a French-American vote is an intolerable anomaly.

We [native-born] could not choose, but they [immigrants] could and did choose to be Americans.

Nationhood is not founded on religion but blood ties, a common culture and homeland.