Black Life Quotes

If you're a black kid, you're going to have hell in your life.

Blacks have experienced a history of victimization in America, beginning obviously in slavery and then another 100 years of segregation. I grew up in segregation. I know very well what it was about and all of the difficulties it placed on black life, and how we were truly held down before the civil-rights movement.

Yet again, the family of a young black man is grieving a life cut short. Yet again, the streets of an American city are marred by violence. What we have seen in Baltimore should, indeed I think does, tear at our soul.

Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on familiar tropes when it comes to representing black women in musicals.

The Fourteenth Amendment, after the civil war, in principle brought former slaves into the category of persons, theoretically. But if you actually look, almost all the cases brought up for personal rights under the Fourteenth Amendment were by corporations. Freed slaves couldn't do it. In fact they were pretty much driven back into something like slavery by a north - south compact, that allowed former slave states to criminalize black life, which made a criminal force that was basically used as a forced labor force, up until the 1930s.

The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.

Far from ending, systemic racism reinvents itself to conform to what is publically acceptable, leaving the quality of black life diminished and more permanently fixed with each passing decade.

There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.

You take a look at the history of African Americans in the US. There's been about thirty years of relative freedom. There was a decade after the Civil War and before north/south compact essentially recriminalized black life. During the Second World War there was a need for free labor so there was a freeing up of the labor force. Blacks benefitted from it.

There's always opposition when you speak on topics like I'm speaking on. But I'm a black man in America. I grew up black in America. You can't tell me that what I've experienced and what I've seen is not true.

I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

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.

. . . what happened, of course, was that I was writing a play set in the 1940's that was supposed to be somehow representative of black American life, and I didn't have any women in there. And I knew that wasn't going to work.

If black lives matter, then why is it that black women are more than five times as likely as a white woman to have an abortion? I think the womb that brings forth the black life should matter... Because black lives absolutely matter, what about the babies in that womb? What about that mama?

From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn't fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched.

I don't trust white critics' judgment about most things that deal with black life, particularly when a black person is the creator.

We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that.

The criminalization of Black life was something specific to the United States in the post-Reconstruction period and there's something like it happening today with mass incarceration, directed largely against black males.

Clearly a black man's life is not worth a ham sandwich.

As a black man in America, I have lived the truth.

We need to fight for a new human rights movement that recognizes and values black life.

In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.

When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused.