Black American Quotes

I'm a black American, I am proud of my race. I am proud of who I am. I have a lot of pride and dignity.

Schools don't teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history.

I'm not offended if you call me an African American. I prefer a black American.

I am a black American, I say, and thus announce my atavistic connection to all others who live as black Americans, to all who ever lived as black Americans. Religion, caste, class, gender and race can all be atavisms, and they are inherently anti-democratic because they exclude all outside the atavism.

I used to go to soul nights because I loved dancing, and so did my friends, and we loved the music. We used to go listen to black American soul.

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.

One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man.' It is his masterwork - it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem.

In looking at difficulties in the black American community over the years, it has always astounded me how much white Americans take for granted the rich and utterly decisive heritage of Western culture.

Among Negroes of my generation there was not only little direct acquaintance or consciously inherited knowledge of Africa, but much distaste and recoil because of what the white world taught them about the Dark Continent. There arose resentment that a group like ours, born and bred in the United States for centuries, should be regarded as Africans at all. They were, as most of them began gradually to assert, Americans. My father's father was particularly bitter about this. He would not accept an invitation to a 'Negro' picnic. He would not segregate himself in any way.

As much as I think it is necessary and desirable for white people to have an expanded view of the black American experience, it's probably even more important for black people to have that expanded view.

I lament that Paris can be a threatening space for Jews, Roma, Africans and Arabs, but the truth is, as a black American, I've never felt safer or less harassed anywhere.

I find myself frequently introducing myself to someone, saying that, you know, I've grown up black and biracial in the United States.

I joke to people in the press that I realize I'm not black, I'm actually white. But I've got these roots in black American music. I love it.

I think that we've got to come to see this. The Negro is an American.

America is as much a black country as a white one. The lives and destinies of the white American are bound up inextricably with those of the black American.

A bargainer is a black who enters the American, the white American mainstream by saying to whites in effect, in some code form, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

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.

My biggest inspiration is black America and what they've done in the arts. I have always felt like an outsider in America, and what black Americans have done to add their chapter to this book called the American dream, and to be so unapologetic and true, and have added so much to art and culture in the world.

There is an imagined thing called black culture. But culture is a construction. It is learned behavior, not innate. The black American experience is the American experience.

Afro-Caribbean and African immigrants are seeking to attain elevated minority status by remaining perpetual outsiders and forever foreign so not to every fully incorporate themselves into the black American populace.

Dubois was the first black American to graduate from Harvard. He was accepted within the northern white intellectual circles as one of the 'best of his race.' As an avowed socialist, he was the only black member of the original 19 wealthy socialist founders of the NAACP.

Questlove is an artist who I respect because he constantly shifts within the idiom, challenging perceptions of hip-hop and black American culture.

We are African in origin and American in birth.