Racial Expression Quotes

There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules - I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists.

The day a race ceases to express its thought and its sentiments in that language which has grown with it and which took form with its ethnic temperament, it is lost as a race. The preservation of its language is absolutely necessary to the preservation of the race, of its genius, its character and it's temperament.

There are a plethora of ways of being black, just like there's many ways to being white.

I've never been one to carry race on my sleeve, and I've never been one to really use my race.

In the 1950s, when we went to Lord's, you had to sit down, and it was very prim and proper. It was only in the 1960s when we started to do well that West Indians started voicing their opinions.

I am whatever you want me to be and I can't control that. My experience is my experience, but I can't really claim anything. I know when I take my wig off at night and I have to twist my hair up, I'm black. But I don't get too personal most of the time.

I was never a white guy pretending to be black. Not once, ever, did it occur to me that I was being phony or fraudulent or fake. Quite the opposite - I always believed I was living the truest form of my self.

Today's multiracial Americans are at greater liberty to choose how they'd like to be seen, and under less pressure to pass for white.

Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness, and your black presence.

The genius of Rachel Dolezal's transracial achievement is that it has nearly limitless applications. Rachel is taking 'the power of positive thinking' to a whole new level.

With my face paint on, I don't look like a regular black dude.

I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

I really just prefer to be exactly who I am, and black is really the closest race and cultural category that represents the essence of who I am.

Anyone reading contemporary poetry - especially contemporary African-American poetry - will quickly see that race is an enduring subject. What some don't realize is just how diverse the handling of that subject is. It's as diverse as blackness.

Don't fault me for wearing a 20-inch blond wig - it doesn't mean I want to be a white person.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.