Quotes & Sayings About African Culture

To live your life well, and have respect for what came before or after - there's a strong respect for that in African culture. — Anna Deavere Smith

Culture is about humanizing people. You look at the African-American civil rights movement, you look at the LGBT rights movement - the culture changed before the politics did. — Jose Antonio Vargas

Feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage: You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women should always be in charge, you don't wear makeup, you don't shave, you're always angry, you don't have a sense of humor, you don't use deodorant. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Increasingly independent black economic, cultural and political power gave Blacks more freedom to do what came natural to them. Divorced from White influence and culture, they reverted quickly to their genotype - increasingly typical of black societies around the world. Males exhibited exaggerated sexual aggression and promiscuity that led to the dissolution of the Black nuclear family in America. Females reverted to the age-old African model of maternal provisioning of children. — David Duke

I've got to where am in life not because of something I brought to the world but through something I found - the wealth of African culture. — Hugh Masekela

We have to realize our black heritage in order to give us strength to move on and progress. But as far as returning to the old African culture, it's unnecessary and it's not advantageous in many respects. We believe that culture itself will not liberate us. We're going to need some stronger stuff. — Huey Newton

I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody. — Spike Lee

It's one thing when other African-Americans try to threaten my race card, but when people outside of my ethnicity have the audacity to question how 'down' I am because of the bleak, stereotypical picture pop culture has painted for me as a black woman? Unacceptable. — Issa Rae

It wasn't until I came to New York and started to see the African American community, but also the Ethiopian community here, and started to eat the food, started to understand the music. I said, you know, I got to go and understand the culture. So me and my sister went. — Marcus Samuelsson

Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement. — Michael Eric Dyson

I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture. — Djimon Hounsou

Kukurukuuu,' our big rooster crowed as usual and it nearly put me off my sleep. My eyes were neither open nor close. In trying to go back to sleep I rolled to both sides on my small wooden bed, covered with a mat. The room was partially dark and warm, sleepless rats busy under my bed in search of food. — Obehi Peter Ewanfoh

So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features. — Henry Louis Gates

In America, Rousseauism has turned Freud's conflict-based psychoanalysis into weepy hand-holding. Contemporary liberalism is untruthful about cosmic realities. Therapy, defining anger and hostility in merely personal terms, seeks to cure what was never a problem before Rousseau. Mediterranean, as well as African-American, culture has a lavish system of language and gesture to channel and express negative emotion. Rousseauists who take the Utopian view of personality are always distressed or depressed over world outbreaks of violence and anarchy. But because, as a Sadean, I believe history is in nature and of it, I tend to be far more cheerful and optimistic than my liberal friends. Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium. Films like Seven Samurai (1954) and Two Women (1961) accurately show the breakdown of social controls as a regression to animal-like squalor. — Camille Paglia

I think it's easier for African American and white comics to be praised than it is Latinos because they think our culture or our humor is substandard. I mean, I just don't think they want to give us credit. I just don't think that they see us as important enough to be at their level. I'm the longest-produced comedy at Warner Bros. and I don't feel special. They come over and say hello. But everybody's gonna make a lot of money and I don't feel like I'm special to them. — George Lopez

I'm African-American by my culture, not by my color. Race does not exist. — Terry Crews

A lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there. — Wangechi Mutu

It's obvious that the rest of the world loves high African culture - African culture, period. — Hugh Masekela

I love my own culture. I love my African-American culture very deeply, and I know it deserves to be honored. You have to be aware that people are suffering unjustly, and given our own history we have a duty to stand for the people who are being treated like our parents and grandparents and children were treated. — Alice Walker

In the General History of Africa, we come across very impressive facts about the culture of primitive African peoples. It is known, for example, that in the old African kingdoms, all foreigners-whether white or colored- enjoyed hospitality and had the same rights as the native people. At the same time, a foreigner in ancient Rome or Greece usually became a slave. Such and similar facts have probably made Leo Frobenius, a well-known German ethnologist and a great connoisseur of Africa, write : The Africans are civilized up to their bones, and the idea of their being barbarians is a European fiction. — Alija Izetbegovic

One of the things that made the Black Muslim movement grow was its emphasis upon things African. This was the secret to the growth of the Black Muslim movement. African blood, African origin, African culture, African ties. And you'd be surprised - we discovered that deep within the subconscious of the black man in this country, he is still more African than he is American. — Malcolm X

American high school culture was impenetrable to me, and very cliquey: you had the Hispanics, the African Americans, the surfer guys and the goths and the immigrants. The jocks and the surfers got the girls. By the time I'd got to grips with it, I'd graduated. — Khaled Hosseini

In addition, the most reliable and recent studies of African tribal culture demonstrated that slavery was a long-standing custom among the Africans themselves, so enslaved Africans in America were simply experiencing a condition here that they would otherwise experience, probably in more oppressive fashion, in their mother country. — Joseph J. Ellis

From politics and business to music and food to culture, African-Americans have helped to shape our state's colourful past and its future. — Mary Landrieu

What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export. — David Simon

It's really important to have life strategies and part of that is sort of knowing where you want to go so you can have a map that helps you to get there. And the traditional way tells us oh we get into school and someone else advises us, helps us, but that often does not work for African Americans female and male. Because what works for the dominant culture often does not work for us. — Bell Hooks

It's depressing to see blacks wanting to dive into the mainstream of American commercial life. They come from a magnificent African culture based on aesthetics, and they all want to become fort builders like the vicious people who originally enslaved them. — George Carlin

When I got near teen age, I was so happy with my friends and the African-American culture that I couldn't imagine not being part of it. — Johnny Otis

It seemed [there are] musical nodes on the planet where cultures meet and mix, sometimes as a result of unfortunate circumstances, like slavery or something else, in places like New Orleans and Havana and Brazil. And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that. — David Byrne

We black Southerners, through life, love, and labor, are the generators and architects of American music, narrative, language, capital, and morality. That belongs to us. Take away all those stolen West African girls and boys forced to find an oral culture to express, resist, and signify in the South, and we have no rich American idiom. — Kiese Laymon

The African-American community still needs to come together as one and stand up for rights of the people and of what's happening in their culture, their community. — Ziggy Marley

Oral tradition is practised in most African cultures: ideals, family histories and legacies are handed down from one generation to the other physically or verbally. However, this system is flawed in the sense that a lot of African innovation, experience and culture have been lost, undocumented. — Nana Awere Damoah

When their voices didn't reach my ears,
I rebelled against my own skin
too young to realize that without their
stories I would starve. — Kiana Davis

The author relates the progress of inoculation against smallpox in America with the interaction between an African slave named Onisimus whose homeland knew how to treat the malady and and leading clergyman Cotton Mather who was curious and open-minded enough to listen to him. — Robert J. Allison

I think there's beauty in repetition. And that's part of my culture and African culture as well: repeated things, mantra. It's spiritual, it's meditation, it's Buddhism, it's praying, it's all these things. — Robert Glasper

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture. — Nelson Mandela

Planters clung to their proslavery beliefs even when there were facts to the contrary because the stakes involved in abandoning them were too high. They could not reject or even compromise their central myths, for to do so would mean condemning a whole culture as a lie...Ideologies, once constructed, have lives of their own. Any evidence which might have contradicted the planters' basic beliefs faced an a priori denial. — James L. Roark

African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures. — Malcolm-Jamal Warner

What the new government of Nigeria and other African governments must do, is to start a massive reorientation campaign in the culture of the dignity of labour. — Sunday Adelaja

Is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the second, by the Grace of God, still monarch of any African realm? No. this couldn't be a protest against Her Majesty to abdicate any African realm. No! Or is he or she avenging the substitution of African beliefs with Western culture by the British Missionaries who destroyed their culture and heritage? — S.A. David

So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation. — Zora Neale Hurston

As black people in a white-supremacist culture we have had a psychohistory of learning to utterly hide or repress our vulnerability in order to survive. When this survival strategy links with the overall cultural devaluation of vulnerability it makes sense that so many black folks have wrongly interpreted invulnerability as a sign of emotional strength. Maintaining this survival strategy when we no longer have to fear extreme violence at the hands of racist whites has damaged our emotional and intimate bonds. The inability to be vulnerable means that we are unable to feel. If we cannot feel we cannot truly emotionally connect with one another. We cannot know love. No wonder then that the lovelessness that abounds in our culture is even more intense among African-Americans. — Bell Hooks

In the American way of life pleasure involves comfort, convenience, and sexual stimulation. Pleasure, so defined, has little to do with the past and views the future as no more than a repetition of a hedonistically driven present. This market morality stigmatizes others as objects for personal pleasure or bodily stimulation. The reduction of individuals to objects of pleasure is especially evident in the culture industries
television, radio, video, music. Like all Americans, African Americans are influenced greatly by the images of comfort. These images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others and thereby edge out nonmarket values
love, care, service to others
handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward of self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America. — Cornel West

Names are powerful and are prophecies of the future. The name you are called is a sign of what you are and what you would become. — Jude Idada

The Afro-American experience is the only real culture that America has. Basically, every American tries to walk, talk, dress and behave like African Americans. — Hugh Masekela

The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment. — Dambisa Moyo

I didn't want to try and borrow kudos from Indonesian culture. I was trying to get a fresh perspective on these instruments. I'm not doing a Paul Simon Gracelands and stealing all this African music and not give anyone any credit. — Squarepusher

I never experimented with the hoddu like I wanted to do. Like on the song "Allah Addu," the hoddu and the voice is something that belongs to West African culture. When you go to the north of Mali, in the past it was just the singer and one instrument player. We never really did have that on our CDs. On some other songs, like "Laare Yoo," we have a whole section of hoddu, something like four of them playing together. — Baaba Maal

Africa is one continent, one people, and one nation. The notion that in order to have a nation it is necessary for there to be a common language, a common territory and common culture has failed to stand the test of time or the scrutiny of scientific definition of objective reality ... The community of economic life is the major feature within a nation, and it is the economy which holds together the people living in a territory. It is on this basis that the new Africans recognise themselves as potentially one nation, whose dominion is the entire African continent. — Kwame Nkrumah

As players of instruments, it is our duty to reach out and give light to those in the dark in whatever way that we can. All my actions are a fulfilment of all the African music genres - I'm only trying to maintain the culture and the tradition. I am a musician. — Sizzla

A truly enlightened attitude to language should simply be to let six thousand or more flowers bloom. Subcultures should be allowed to thrive, not just because it is wrong to squash them, because they enrich the wider culture. Just as Black English has left its mark on standard English Culture, South Africans take pride in the marks of Afrikaans and African languages on their vocabulary and syntax.
New Zealand's rugby team chants in Maori, dancing a traditional dance, before matches. French kids flirt with rebellion by using verlan, a slang that reverses words' sounds or syllables (so femmes becomes meuf). Argentines glory in lunfardo, an argot developed from the underworld a centyry ago that makes Argentine Spanish unique still today. The nonstandard greeting "Where y'at?" for "How are you?" is so common among certain whites in New Orleans that they bear their difference with pride, calling themselves Yats. And that's how it should be. — Robert Lane Greene

but the African has not yet endured the utter alienation of himself from his people and his past. His mother did not sing "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," and he has not, all his life long, ached for acceptance in a culture which pronounced straight hair and white skin the only acceptable beauty. They face each other, the Negro and the African, over a gulf of three hundred years - an alienation too vast to be conquered in an evening's good-will — James Baldwin

African-Americans are always forced to learn the other culture, but the other culture is not forced to learn ours. I went to acting school at Juilliard, and we learned Shakespeare and Shaw, but we never did the work of a single African-American playwright, not August Wilson or Ntozake Shange or Imir Baraka. — Tracie Thoms

Those who have not lived in New Orleans have missed an incredible, glorious, vital city
a place with an energy unlike anywhere else in the world, a majority-African American city where resistance to white supremacy has cultivated and supported a generous, subversive, and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues, and and hip-hop to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funerals, and the citywide tradition of red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and food and traditions and sexuality and liberation. — Jordan Flaherty

From blood banking to the modern subway, from jazz to social justice, the contributions of African Americans have shaped and molded and influenced our national culture and our national character. — Bill Frist

People ask me if I miss the States. I miss African Americans. But not the U.S. government or all the things they put me through. I miss African American culture, our speech, dance and cooking. — Assata Shakur

Jesse Jackson's living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture — Mark Steyn

Black is not a notion. Africa is not a color. Africa is a culture. So you can be pitch black and I am my color but I'm more African than you can ever be because culturally there are certain things that you just don't understand. — Jihan El-Tahri

When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers. — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

'Who Fears Death' addresses the push and pull in African culture that powerful women face when their culture has certain duties and beliefs that can stifle them. — Nnedi Okorafor

Of course much of this was tongue-in-cheek, but what it shows is how that word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage: you hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women should always be in charge, you don't wear make-up, you don't shave, you're always angry, you don't have a sense of humour, you don't use deodorant. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in 'real' African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Jamestown changed the world in many ways, but perhaps it shaped our nation most profoundly the day Africans arrived. I can't think of a more relevant place to talk about the issues facing our community today than the place where African culture became American culture. — Tavis Smiley

The speaker was good, I liked what he had to say. I had expected a dry recitation on how women should change their gender if they expected to advance in a man's world, since I wasn't about to grow a cock and balls this man gave me hope and inspiration. Women dominated the audience, not surprising since the average African man wouldn't support a speaker preaching gender equality. Africa was a continent with generational precedent for the alpha male, it was part of their culture, learned at an early age. This led to abuse on many levels. Women were expected to do the physical work, produce male babies and satisfy the sexual urgings of men. Urgings that in other societies would be called rape but in Africa were accepted as common practice. I understood this better than most. Pictures of the Kony boy-soldiers and their adult commander were burned into my memory. — Nick Hahn

I was in Paris last year, where there's a great appreciation of many different aspects of African culture and of black culture. The music ... the art ... whatever ... And I kind of went with that. — Lenny Kravitz

For a certain generation of African immigrants cleaning offices became part of the culture like male circumcision and supporting Arsenal. — Ben Aaronovitch

I think there's no question that Michael Jackson was the foremost entertainer of his generation; perhaps of all time, arguably, taking the skills of a Sammy Davis, Jr., bringing together the street dance of African American urban culture, joining them to the politics of dance, of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly on that sphere alone. — Michael Eric Dyson

The [Kwanzaa] holiday, then will of necessity, be engaged as an ancient and living cultural tradition which reflects the best of African thought and practice in its reaffirmation of the dignity of the human person in community and culture, the well-being of family and community, the integrity of the environment and our kinship with it, and the rich resource and meaning of a people's culture. — Maulana Karenga

Organizations like the UN do a lot of good, but there are certain basic realities they never seem to grasp ... Maybe the most important truth that eludes these organizations is that it's insulting when outsiders come in and tell a traumatized people what it will take for them to heal.
You cannot go to another country and make a plan for it. The cultural context is so different from what you know that you will not understand much of what you see. I would never come to the US and claim to understand what's going on, even in the African American culture. People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, but they are not stupid. They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked.
That includes women. Most especially women ...
To outsiders like the UN, these soldiers were a problem to be managed. But they were our children. — Leymah Gbowee

There's a thing called the 'One Drop' theory in African-American culture, which is if you have one drop of black blood in you, you're black. — Keegan-Michael Key

I don't believe in the clash of cultures. The culture is one. The culture is a ring off the same chain. Picasso was very much influenced by the African arts, and he influenced a whole other generation of artists. So everything influences everything. — Marjane Satrapi

Popular culture - above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R & B roots - did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader. — Camille Paglia

The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies. — Ishmael Reed

The 'civil rights' revolutionary groups are a case in point. Their goal is not equality but power. The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of magic are control and power ... Voodoo or magic was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive. — R.J. Rushdoony

Sejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts - the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish. — Adam Rex

Coming up in the African-American culture, we were taught that we belonged to the universe and society was wrong in the way it dealt with us. We had to learn to express and affirm values not from the winning position. — Bernice Johnson Reagon

he and a good part of the Deaf community are against cochlear implants because they don't believe that being deaf is a disability or that they need to be fixed. He says it would be like white people trying to paint African American people white. Some deaf people also view the use of cochlear implants as a loss of their Deaf Culture. — Brandi Rarus

The gracefulness of the slender fishing boats that glided into the harbor in Dakar was equaled only by the elegance of the Senegalese women who sailed through the city in flowing robes and turbaned heads. I wandered through the nearby marketplace, intoxicated by the exotic spices and perfumes. The Senegalese are a handsome people and I enjoyed the brief time that Oliver and I spent in their country. The society showed how disparate elements
French, Islamic, and African
can mingle to create a unique and distinctive culture. — Nelson Mandela

Though many strive to hide their human libidinousness from themselves and each other, being a force of nature, it breaks through. Lots of uptight, proper Americans were scandalized by the way Elvis moved his hips when he sang "rock and roll." But how many realized what the phrase rock and roll meant? Cultural historian Michael Ventura, investigating the roots of African-American music, found that rock 'n' roll was a term that originated in the juke joints of the South. Long in use by the time Elvis appeared, Ventura explains the phrase "hadn't meant the name of a music, it meant 'to fuck.' 'Rock,' by itself, has pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least." By the mid-1950s, when the phrase was becoming widely used in mainstream culture, Ventura says the disc jockeys "either didn't know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew. — Christopher Ryan

One of the biggest dishes in Sicily is couscous, and there's always been a North African influence on Italian culture, culinary culture there. — Jonas Carpignano

People take pride in being Irish-American and Italian-American. They have a particular culture that infuses the whole culture and makes it richer and more interesting. I think if we can expand that attitude to embrace African-Americans and Latino-Americans and Asian-Americans, then we will be in a position where all our kids can feel comfortable with the worlds they are coming out of, knowing they are part of something larger. — Barack Obama

The equilibrium you admire in me is an unstable one, difficult to maintain. My inner life was split early between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the exigencies of black-African culture and those of modern life. — Leopold Sedar Senghor

It is my hope that as we commemorate Black History Month in the future, we will continue to celebrate the many achievements and rich culture of African-Americans. — Eliot Engel

I try to find the core values that are so fundamental that they transcend ethnic identity. That doesn't mean I run from it. I embrace African-American culture and I love it and embrace it, but it is a part of a human identity. So I'm always trying to make a larger human statement. — Wynton Marsalis

My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South. — John Edgar Wideman

What we call soul has been around a long time. It comes out of a particular culture that is African in origin, but influenced by 250 years of slavery, as well as other forms of racial oppression. — Roy Ayers

The African Challenge - We must end conflict in Africa. We must lead to allow the Africans to enjoy the benefits from their natural resources. We must end poverty in Africa. Every African must be educated, have access to health care and a fair chance to fulfil their dream. Preventable sickness and disease must not reduce life expectancy or rob pregnant women of a chance to continue living. Africa must develop. Africa must not depend on foreign aid. Africa must be united and governed more effectively. Africa must customize her leadership culture and philosophy in a way that gives her global relevance and respect but still remain true and authentic to herself. Will you accept the challenge? Will you be that Africa? — Archibald Marwizi

For the first time since I began acting, I feel that I've found my place in the world, that there's something out of my own culture which i can express and perhaps help others preserve..i have found out now that the African natives had a definite culture a long way beyond the culture of the Stone age ... an integrated thing, which is still unspoiled by western influences ... I think the Americans will be amazed to find how many of the modern dance steps are relics of African heritage. — Paul Robeson

What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African
American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly
reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity. — David Brion Davis

I majored in directing. However, I did spend some time at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, so I am somewhat well-versed in African Studies. — Chadwick Boseman

To make an absolutely gross generalization, I think a lot of people feel like if you're mixed, more often than not you're quote unquote white. So if you're mixed, you embrace the mainstream culture more than the African-American culture. — Keegan-Michael Key

That argument doesn't make any sense to me. So we want to advance as a society and a culture, but, say, if something happens to an African-American we immediately come to his defense? Yet you want to talk about how far we've progressed as a society? Well, we've progressed as a society, then don't jump to somebody's defense just because they're African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right? So I won't assert myself. — Kobe Bryant

Haiti is unique - the first successful slave revolt in history, the first black republic etc., and then when you get into the culture, the voodoo, and that wonderful synchretization of Christian and African belief and symbology, it's like nothing the world has ever seen. — Ben Fountain

There is nothing inherently evil in the process of making money,
and the notion is illogical, but that is one of the underlying tenets
in our present education system. We are taught from an early age
that making money is hard and that those who make lots of money
are morally suspect. American culture studies programs at some of
the nation's leading universities have even gone so far as to teach the
absurd and illogical notion that the rich became rich because they
enjoy privilege earned on the backs of African slaves. Minority
millionaires like entrepreneur Herman Cain, Earl Graves, Sr., and
Reginald F. Lewis prove the utter nonsense of this notion, yet this
is the illogical Progressive philosophy that has permeated our education
system. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

My name, Solange, means 'Angel of the sun,' and I'm completely enamored of my African history. The culture is so expressive. — Solange Knowles

The most important obstacle to speed and ease of assimilation, however, is race. In the nineteenth century, swarthy Jews, "black" Irish, and Italian "guineas" - a not so subtle euphemism borrowed from the African country of Guinea - were all seen as what we today call "people of color." These immigrants terrified lighter-skinned native-born Americans, who accepted the newcomers as "white" only when they - actually, their descendants - began to earn middle-class incomes. Of course, skin color does not affect an immigrant's ability to absorb American culture. But color can play a large part in hindering economic and social assimilation: today's black newcomers, from the Caribbean and elsewhere, are often treated as part of the African-American population, with all the associated disadvantages. — Tamar Jacoby

I don't see a huge difference between the African condition and the black American condition. The only real difference is that black Americans live in the richest country on Earth surrounded by a majority white population and are almost entirely disconnected from their original culture and their God-given identity. — Kola Boof

In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad. — Moby

The witch is a dangerous person. Neither his appearance nor his behaviour betray his satanic nature. He does not wear special clothing, he does not have magical instruments. He does not boil potions, does not prepare poisons, does not fall into a trance, and does not perform incantations. He acts by means of the psychic power he was born. Malefaction is a congenital trait of his personality. The fact that he does evil and brings misfortune owes nothing to his predilections. It brings him not special pleasure. He simply is that way. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

In African American culture, class bias is the handmaiden of intraracial prejudice that privileges the near-white or light-complexioned person over the darker-hued. — Rita B. Dandridge