Black Identity Quotes & Sayings

Seen theologically, then, walking is an act of faith. Walking is, after all, interrupted falling.We see, we listen, we speak, and we trust that each step we take won't be our last, but will lead us into a richer understanding of the self and the world.

In Jamaica, I felt once again as if the only identity that mattered was my own, not the constricted one that others had constructed for me. I strolled into my better self. I said, along with Kierkegaard, "I have walked myself into my best thoughts." (Garnette Cadogan in "Black and Blue") — Jesmyn Ward

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond. — Lauren Slater

When I was a teenager, black pride became newly popular again. Suddenly a lot of black people were wearing the fake kente cloth and red black and green and Bob Marley. That was sort of my window into finding my own identity as a black person. — W. Kamau Bell

And this is when I knew I was black for real.
This is when I knew black was a city
whose walls were constantly under siege.... — Roger Bonair-Agard

And Hopkins, seeing that Tisdall was unaware of Grant's identity, rushed in with glad maliciousness. "That is Scotland Yard," he said. "Inspector Grant. Never had an unsolved crime to his name." "I hope you write my obituary," Grant said. "I hope I do!" the journalist said, with fervor. — Josephine Tey

The reason we life black people isn't because they're black. We like them because they're not as grey as we are. — John Cage

I feel that sometimes, holding yourself as black, saying that is your sole identity, can sometimes stand in your way of being a member of the humanity of man, being a member of the family of the divine. — Giancarlo Esposito

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example. — Henry Louis Gates

No one asks to be born, to be black or white or any color in between and yet the identity a person is born into becomes the hardest to explain to the world — A. Igoni Barrett

I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. — Philip Pullman

Body piercing and baggy clothes express identity among black youth, and not just beginning with hip-hop culture. Moreover, young black entrepreneurs like Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs and Russell Simmons have made millions from their clothing lines. — Michael Eric Dyson

Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky. — John Berger

People from pre-sexual revolution and even from the 60s and the birth of the gay movement still define gay as two men or two women having sex. Our generation defines it from a more emotional standpoint. To be gay means you are drawn to the same sex. But it's a part of who you are, an identity, not an act. — Dustin Lance Black

People even said I was a racist because I shot black bank robbers at the beginning of Dirty Harry. So, first I'm labeled right-wing. Then I'm a racist. Now it's macho or male chauvinism. It's a whole number nowadays to make people feel guilty on different levels. It doesn't bother me because I know where the fuck I am on the planet and I don't give a shit. — Clint Eastwood

The North American situation, while different from the Brazilian one, reflects a similar complexity and ambiguity in the relationship between race and ethnicity. Whereas Brazilians have a great number of terms used to designate people of varying pigmentation, the 'one-drop principle' prevalent in the USA entails that people are either black or white, and that 'a single drop of black blood' (sic) contaminates an otherwise pale person and makes him or her black. Conversely, ethnic identity in the USA is, as mentioned above, not necessarily correlated with 'race'. At the same time, African- American identities are associated — Thomas Hylland Eriksen

There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Once upon a time black male "cool" was defined by the ways in which black men confronted hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged. They took the pain of it and used it alchemically to turn the pain into gold. That burning process required high heat. Black male cool was defined by the ability to withstand the heat and remain centered. It was defined by black male willingness to confront reality, to face the truth, and bear it not by adopting a false pose of cool while feeding on fantasy; not by black male denial or by assuming a "poor me" victim identity. It was defined by individual black males daring to self-define rather than be defined by others. — Bell Hooks

We've gone through the names - Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that's an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black? — Spike Lee

We black women are the single group in the West intact. And anybody can see we're pretty shaky. We are, however (all praises), the only group that derives its identity from itself. — Nikki Giovanni

The very identity of racist Southerners depends upon contrasting themselves with those dirty black "nigras." But, conversely, the out-groups feel that they are really and truly "in," and nourish their collective ego with relishingly indignant conversation about squares, Ofays, Wasps, Philistines, and the blasted bourgeoisie. Even Saint Thomas Aquinas let it out that part of the blessedness of the saints in Heaven was that they could look over the battlements and enjoy the "proper justice" of the sinners squirming in Hell. All winners need losers; all saints need sinners; all sages need fools - that is, so long as the major kick in life is to "amount to something" or to "be someone" as a particular and separate godlet. — Alan W. Watts

Patriarchal hip-hop ushered in a world where black males could declare that they were "keeping it real" when what they were really doing was taking the dead patriarchal protest of the black power movement and rearticulating it in forms that, though entertaining, had for the most part no transformative power, no ability to intervene on the politics of domination, and turn the real lives of black men around. — Bell Hooks

My world today is raw, it is a world of great vital difficulty. Because, more than a star, today I want the thick and black root of the stars, I want the source that always seems dirty, and is dirty, and that is always incomprehensible.
It is with pain that I bid farewell even to the beauty of a child - I want the adult who is more primitive and ugly and drier and more difficult, and who became a child-seed that cannot be broken between the teeth. — Clarice Lispector

By dismantling the narrow politics of racial identity and selective self-interest, by going beyond 'black' and 'white,' we may construct new values, new institutions and new visions of an America beyond traditional racial categories and racial oppression. — Manning Marable

They wanted to force me to be someone that I wasn't. They wanted me to delegitimize myself as a trans woman - and I was not taking that. As a trans woman - as a proud black trans woman - I was not going to allow the system to delegitimize and hyper-sexualize and take my identity away from me. — CeCe McDonald

I tend to listen to the artists that originally inspired me to start playing music in the first place, because there is a multitude of wisdom that can be gained by bands like Black Sabbath, Depeche Mode, Pink Floyd and the Cure. I think if we were to pay close attention to what's on the radio right now then we'd lose our identity entirely. — Jason C. Miller

There's a sense amongst liberals - who read identity politics into most everything - that conservative women are somehow traitors to their gender (much the same way that black conservatives are traitors to their race and young conservatives are traitors to their generation). To be a conservative woman in the 21st century is to be...ripe for scorn and ridicule by the demonstrably intolerant left. — S. E. Cupp

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship. — Nadine Gordimer

In her mind, the ground rumbled and split open revealing the edge into a dark abyss. The shadows were always calling to her. Laughing at her. The familiar strains of loneliness flared under their torment. Drawing in a deep breath, she screamed to the black, "You're not allowed to hurt me and know it!" Her voice echoed off the earthen walls and whispered back, "Be free. Be fearless. — Jesikah Sundin

What he liked about the Jordan was hat no one could hinder its flow. It has a mind all its own. Other's opinions of its size or depth didn't matter. Only God possessed the power to subvert its course. Whether viewers loved it or not was inconsequential. It was a river, and it was created to flow, and that was exactly what it did. And that's all it did. That was its purpose, and no one could alter that identity regardless of what they thought. — Daniel Black

When the Negro was completely an underdog, he needed white spokesmen. Liberals played their parts in this period exceedingly well ... But now that the Negro has rejected his role as an underdog, he has become more assertive in his search for identity and group solidarity; he wants to speak for himself. — Martin Luther King Jr.

It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks. — Clement Alexander Price

I'm American. Why didn't I say I was African American? Because I'm in a foreign country? But can I really consider myself to be in a foreign country when I could go walking back to my own country right now if I wanted, and it wouldn't even take very long? Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody? — Roberto Bolano

Production of identity is a resistance element, an aggressive element. Both a refusal and an affirmation and an assertion, and certainly, we in Jamaica were talking about black art. And the idea that there is a role for art in the civil rights revolution and in the successor to the civil rights revolution. — Mark McMorris

Identity has several parts, and the self needs to expand. Black youth should be encouraged to have as many parts or as rich an identity as possible. It's a form of allowing them to be curious about the world. — Darryl Pinckney

There was [ in New York] - some of it was this perception of the Midwest that I realized in this multicultural city that - and I don't think it's as true as it was - but everyone was kind of like, what, are you Jewish? Are you Italian? What are you? You know, are you black? Are you da-da-da? Are you Puerto Rican? And so I ended up - my ethnic identity was Midwestern, was white bread. And so it informed a lot of my stand-up. — Jim Gaffigan

I think it's too easy to just say that there is a direct and necessary conflict between black identity and gay identity. I think it's more nuanced than that simply because I think black is a color and then people layer on top of it all kinds of socio-cultural elements. — John Amaechi

When I have my Afro and walk down the street, there's no doubt that I'm black. With this [straightened] hair, if I talk about being black on air, viewers write and say, "You're black?!" I feel [straightening your hair] is giving up a sense of your identity. Let's be honest: It's an effort to look Anglo-Saxon. — Jami Floyd

No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women ... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women. — Bell Hooks

I think that hip-hop should be spelled with a capital "H," and as one word. It's the name of our [black people] culture, and it's the name of our identity and consciousness. I think hip-hop is not a product, but a culture. I think rap is a product, but when hip-hop becomes a product, that's slavery, because you're talking about people's souls. To me, that's the biggest problem. — KRS-One

My identity is very clear to me now, I am a black woman. — Lena Horne

I think that Michael Jackson, just as an entertainer, as a figure who embodies the contradictions of black identity and the possibilities of R&B music in the '70s and '80s, will continue to be one of the most recognized and formidable human beings that we've ever produced in our tradition. — Michael Eric Dyson

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. — Eric Foner

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. — Bell Hooks

The potential significance of Black feminist thought goes far beyond demonstrating that African-American women can be theorists. Like Black feminist practice, which it reflects and which it seeks to foster, Black feminist thought can create a collective identity among African-American women about the dimensions of a Black women's standpoint. Through the process of rearticulating, Black feminist thought can offer African-American women a different view of ourselves and our worlds — Patricia Hill Collins

In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal. — June Jordan

Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"
they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108) — Cornel West

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

I saw her note the way I hovered over the various ethnicities on the form. First the 'white' box, then to the airspace over the 'black' box, a kind of momentary hesitation, a protest of stillness, a staring into the abyss of everything I did not know about myself. She, like me, was made of halves. — Olivia Sudjic

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure. — Bell Hooks

Sleep is where we touch what is better left unexamined. There, the whole of life is bundled up, dwindled. There the carefully hoarded and enjoyed personality, our only treasure and at the same time our only defense must die into the ultimate truth of things, the black lightning that splits and destroys all, the positive, unquestionable nothingness. — William Golding

For years, I wanted to know if there was one person, one voice, one individual inside me. All my life people would call me a chink or a chigger. I couldn't listen to hip-hop and be myself without people questioning my authenticity. Chinese people questioned my yellowness because I was born in America. The white people questioned my identity as an American because I was yellow.
No black or Spanish person ever called me chigger, but hustling all of a sudden got white people off my back. I was the same dude with a different job, but now I was finally "authentic" to white people, and it made me realized it's all a trap. We can't fucking win. If I follow the rules and play the model minority, I'm a lapdog under a bamboo ceiling. If I like hip-hop because I see solidarity, I'm aping. But, if I throw it all away, shit on my parents, sell weed, pills, and strike fear into unsuspecting white boys with stunt Glocks, now I's authentic? Fuck you, America. (171) — Eddie Huang

Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black culture while still living in the white community. You will face more hate and ridicule and ostracism than you can even begin to fathom. People are willing to accept you if they see you as an outsider trying to assimilate into their world. But when they see you as a fellow tribe member attempting to disavow the tribe, that is something they will never forgive. That is what happened to me in Eden Park. — Trevor Noah

My point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe ... I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. — Audre Lorde

"I was born in the US and l have lived in Mexico since 1946. I believe that all these states of being have influenced my work and made it what you see today. I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples. My art speaks for both my peoples" ~ Elizabeth Catlett — Melanie Anne Herzog

These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn't be human. — Hanif Kureishi

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black. — Christopher Hitchens

All the myths and stereotypes used to characterize black womanhood have their roots in negative anti-woman mythology. Yet they form the basis of most critical inquiry into the nature of black female experience. Many people have difficulty appreciating black women as we are because of eagerness to impose an identity upon us based on any number of negative stereotypes. Widespread efforts to continue devaluation of black womanhoodmake it extremely difficult and oftentimes impossible for the black female to develop a positive self-concept. For we are daily bombarded by negative images. Indeed, one strong oppressive force has been this negative stereotype and our acceptance of it as a viable role model upon which we can pattern our lives. — Bell Hooks

In the time just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Perfidia opens, we were pre-psychologized. There were no concepts of identity, no politics of victimization. Reparation wasn't in the language. Nobody thought about giving the great grandchildren of black slaves so much as $1.98. And all of a sudden the bombs hit, interventionism versus isolationism became a dead issue, and it was us-versus-them in a heartbeat. — James Ellroy

To be "bad" is good not simply because it subverts the language of the dominant white culture but also because it imposes a unique kind of order for young black men on their own distinctive chaos and solicits an attention that makes others pull back with some trepidation. This young black male style is a form of self-identification and resistance in a hostile culture; it also is an instance of machismo identity ready for violent encounters. — Cornel West

I feel like because black Cuban artists don't have the kind of pressure to thematize race in the way that African-American artists do, there's more space for them to do their art without having to discuss it in terms of racial identity. — Rachael Price

Behind every act in Israel's identity politics stretches, like a long black shadow, the idea of an eternal power and race. — Shlomo Sand

It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wide iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees. — Trish Deseine

What good's a black face if it means I'm just someone else's property? Why give me these arms and legs just to carry someone else's load, not my own? — Stacey Lee

Fluidity means that our black identities are constantly changing as we respond to circumstances in our families and communities of origin, and as we interact with a wider world. — Bell Hooks

In India, where there are no passports or identity discs, and where religions counts for so much- except among those few who have crossed the 'black water' - I believe that a man wearing a saffron robe, or carrying a beggar's bowl , or with silver crosses on his headgear and chest, could walk from Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin without once being questioned about his destination, or the object of his journey, — Jim Corbett

For many of us it seems that to be a feminist in the way that we have seen or understood feminism is to conform to an identity and way of living that doesn't allow for individuality, complexity, or less than perfect personal histories. We fear that the identity will dictate and regulate our lives, instantaneously pitting us against someone, forcing us to choose inflexible and unchanging sides, female against male, black against white, oppressed against oppressor, good against bad. — Rebecca Walker

Some series teach us that ethnic features must be "fixed," by drastic means if necessary. Plastic surgeons with questionable ethics give insecure women of all ethnicities boob jobs, liposuction, and face-lifts on shows such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and Dr. 90210, ignoring medical risks and reinforcing problematic ideas about women's worth. Yet they don't make white surgical candidates feel like their cultural identity should also be on the chopping blocking - or that they'd be so much more attractive and fulfilled if only they didn't look so... Caucasian.

In contrast, TV docs' scalpels reduce or remove racial markers on patients of colour. Black women's noses and lips are made smaller. In an increasingly common procedure targeting Asian women, creases are added to Asian women's eyelids. — Jennifer L. Pozner

I was trying to establish an identity in music, and black and white had nothing to do with it. — Sam Phillips

Recent events in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have reaffirmed for me, however, the complete folly of any Republican strategy to increase black representation in the Republican Party by appeals based on race. Whatever the name- 'African American Outreach' or 'Black Republicans for Bush'- any effort to attract blacks or any other ethnic group to the Republican party, based on explicit or implicit appeals to race or ethnic identity, are not only a waste of time and resources, but are also misguided and potentially quite damaging to the nation. — Ward Connerly

The most important of these activists was Jimmy Garrett, a member of both the Black Panthers and SNCC. Garrett led discussion groups at which, as he later explained, "we would talk about ourselves seeking identity, and stuff like that. A lot of folks didn't even know they were black. A lot of people thought they were Americans". — Bruce Bawer

In his book The Soul of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois writes about always feeling his twoness
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; to warring ideals in one dark body. — Ron Suskind

I very much related to the idea of sexual identity and how it doesn't have to be black and white. When I first came out, there would be butch people in baseball caps, and that wasn't me, and then there were girls in heels and dresses, and that didn't feel like that was me either. But after a while I learned there's a lot of ground in between. — Dee Rees

The assumption that being gay or black necessarily harms the self-worth of all who fit this category has a patronizing dimension, because it neglects consideration of the agency that persons exercise in respect of imposed identity. — Michael Kenny

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am? — June Jordan