Black Masculinity Quotes

The street is as diverse as any other sector, but in peoples' mind it gets appropriated as a black man who's tough. Trying to make it through by staying hard and phallocentric. To me, that is just an impoverished conception of what it is to be a black male. It doesn't do justice to my grandfather, my father, my brother - or just the black men I grew up with.

Black males who refuse categorization are rare, for the price of visibility in the contemporary world of white supremacy is that black identity be defined in relation to the stereotype whether by embodying it or seeking to be other than it…Negative stereotypes about the nature of black masculinity continue to overdetermine the identities black males are allowed to fashion for themselves.

As a black man, I have to respect myself and have nice things. As a man in general.

If you don't know about the 'black male code,' you should. It's something black boys learn early, even before adolescence. It goes, in part, like this: Even though you're not a criminal, some people assume you are, especially if you're wearing certain clothes. Never argue with the police, but protect your dignity and take pride in humility.

With the black male as a teenager, where you're coming from the ghettos and that kind of stuff, you've got to assert yourself, be macho, not let anybody walk over you, so that's where all this unnecessary bullshit comes from - from egos. That's why there are a lot of fights. That's how come the whole thing with rap has been violent. It's because of the male ego.

When you're a young black man, you're not allowed to be emotional. One of the reasons I act is people pay me to be emotional.

There are so many stereotypes of how you have to be as a black man, growing up in the community as a man.

I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man. I had to show the world.

I remember as a young man seeing these bigger-than-life, strong images of black manhood in the form of Jim Brown and Fred Williamson, Jim Kelly, Billy Dee Williams. All these guys were these alpha males who were smart, attractive. I said, 'Wow, I want to be like that.'

We as men, in particular black men, are constantly supported, nurtured, forgiven, apologized for, led, followed and coddled by black women, and they get very little in return.

So often when Black men have to play roles on TV, we're either the noble savage or we're completely a savage, and there's no nuance.

Black fathers are often disappointed if their sons aren't good at sports. Not excelling at sports as a black boy meant not being cool - even weirder, it meant not really being black.

We're raised to believe that black men have to be one specific way.

If the KKK was smart enough, they would've created gangsta rap because it's such a caricature of black culture and black masculinity.

I love the of dealing with the homoerotic versus the idea of dealing with certain tropes with regards to black masculinity in the world, propensity towards sports, antisocial behavior, hypersexuality - all of these sort of non-truths that I don't exist in but that I see as being fixed in the world's imagination.

I only became an actor to get your attention, to challenge the archetype of an African American male; I can't be anything else in this lifetime than an African American man.

I enjoy challenging perspective - challenging ideas of what it means to be a black man.

In the end, so much of what I wanted to do was to have a body of work that exhaustively looked at black American notions of masculinity: how we look at black men - how they're perceived in public and private spaces - and to really examine that, going from every possible angle.

I don't think that there are many, many strong, black male role models who provide a certain kind of really American, Southern-based comfort that Madea grows out of. She's a signpost in our Obama world of traditional Christian values.

Clearly, Black men need to employ a feminist analysis that will address the issue of how to construct a life sustaining Black masculinity that does not have its roots in patriarchal phallocentrism.

The number one thing that has to be done, [black men] has to be retaught, be given - he has to be reeducated and made to know that he's a man, like anyone else, and then he can stand on his own two feet, like others have done.

I'm trying to illuminate how perilously narrow we draw the concepts of masculinity and sexuality in our male culture - particularly in black male culture - and to help people to see that there's room enough for everyone.

I consciously learned and performed my race like a teacher's pet in an advanced placement course on black masculinity.

There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.