African Americans

"The protests are colliding with... the country’s most devastating pandemic in modern history. “With being home and not being able to do as much, that might be amplifying something that is already sort of critical, something that’s already a powerful catalyst, and that is the video,” said Daniel Q. Gillion, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania... “If you aren’t moved by the George Floyd video, you have nothing in you,” he said. “And that catalyst can now be amplified by the fact that individuals probably have more time to engage in protest activity.”"

"People have begun to engage in mutual aid and support for their neighbours. Even if people didn't have much, they were still looking out for each other. Through this, we began to see the ways in which new webs were being constructed. When you're sitting at home or living at a slower pace and you see that Black folks in your community are attacked, killed, murdered by vigilantes and by the police, you wake up, you rise to action, and you rise quickly."

"The process of establishing in Muslim society is neither simple nor straightforward. There is not one strategy, one method or one process. What works today may be unsuccessful tomorrow."

"Women, we naturally want to be the best…And I can’t be mad at the next girl for wanting to be the best! Why would I get mad at you for saying you the baddest? Why can’t we both agree that we bad, and that just be that?"

"I want to tell that story to people that, even though I was chasing my dream, I still was able to get my education…I really want young girls to want to go to college. My grandma and my momma will be so proud too."

"Believe it or not, I used to be a little shy…I never wanted anybody to know that I could even rap. Even when I got to college and I told my best friend I could rap, she’ll be like, ‘OK. Well, then rap.’ She wanted me to rap and I wouldn’t do it. But then we went to a kickback and I just started rapping. . . . I was confident in myself, but I didn’t really know how people would react to how I thought about myself on the inside."

"First step, you got to spend more time in the mirror…Because once you get in the mirror and you start finding shit that you do like about yourself, you’re going to stay in the motherfucking mirror trying to perfect that. That’s how I am. Like, ‘OK, what do you got going on? Bitch, you look good as fuck today!’"

"Color is life, or a world without color appears to us as dead. Colors are the children of light, and light is their mother. Light (...) reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world, through colors. The colors of the rainbow and the Northern Lights soothe and elevate the soul. The rainbow is accounted as a symbol of peace."

"In my opinion Black art is a misnomer. There are black artists and they, like all others, draw from they experiences to produce artistic expressions. If this expression is non representational, it is difficult or not impossible to tell whether the artist is white or non white. There can be no doubt however of the impact traditional African art has had on the world of modern art."

"Art is inevitably the expression of external conditions, modified though they be by the genius and personality of the artist."

"The use of color in my paintings is of paramount importance to me. Through color I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness in my painting rather than on man's inhumanity to man.(...) My goal was not to offend the beauty in nature, but rather to share with others those aspects of it that have given me so much joy."

"The making of a picture involves two processes: a taking in of the impression and giving out of it by the visible expression. (....) The degree of beauty in a picture depends upon the feeling for beauty in the artist and his power to express it."

"Sometimes it seems like a bad trade, but bad trades are part of baseball. Now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God's sake! It's a long season, and you gotta trust it."

"It was nothing personal at all. Robinson is not a young 30. If he had been 26, we might not have traded him."

"It worked out just right. I've had to try to catch Aaron virtually all my career. But he's the home run king, so that means he's the cleanup hitter. That means I got into the Hall of Fame before he did."

"It's in the black players and it remains there. The National League was the first to sign black players and remained ahead all these years. And so many outstanding players are black that it's hard to have an outstanding team without your share of black players. It seemed like the National League teams were willing to sign any promising prospect regardless of color, while the American League was only interested in the outstanding, can't-miss black prospect. And if you don't sign the raw talent that needs a few years to develop, you lose out on some outstanding players."

"I’m not a marcher, I’m a doer…I believe I was the first [African American woman] to win a Grammy in the pop arena, which was basically almost designated for white people..So it was kind of unheard of. I was probably the first person in a lot of areas."

"Wars, segregation, everything that the entire world is going through, emotionally, mentally and physically, it’s in a sad state right now…There’s segregation going on in the States, and segregation going on in the UK. There’s segregation going on everywhere, it’s still the same."

"Performing. That gratification you get when people are enjoying themselves or you see an arm go around a shoulder or somebody grab a hand. It's nice to know that you're part of that particular moment of their lives."

"From what I was taught at home, I already knew what I was doing and how to act and how to dress and how to speak. I came from a safe, solid home."

"My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life."

"Good morning, sir! I've brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!"

"I ask that every colored man in the North who has a vote to cast would cast that vote for the regular Republican Party and thus bury the Democratic Party so deep that there will not be seen even a bubble coming from the spot where the burial took place"

"As some are drawn to bars and others to churches, I’m drawn to bookstores and libraries. They’re sanctuaries. They’re sanctuary. Hope germinates in me that osmosis will take place and whatever goodness is in those books that got them a place on those shelves will leak into me and I’ll produce something that could someday go there."

"They provide relief. Sometimes, it’s the relief of the same genre as what we find in a church sanctuary when the minister ascends to the pulpit and late-morning sunlight is blasting through the windows behind him to gild him and the congregants before you as the choir reaches the climax of the doxology. Sometimes, it’s the relief of a kind yet somehow firm-and-gentle hand at the back of the neck, kneading away not sorrow but the loneliness that can attend it. Sometimes, it’s the relief of discovering you’re no longer bound by the laws of gravity and that, yes, you can actually fly. Sometimes, it’s an answer. Stories do all of these things for us. I’m convinced we’d be utterly lost without them."

"I hate it here. Everything's so—' She searches for a word that will tell Mama how violent it always is or how much she hates having to hide in the closet every time it even looks like gangbangers might roll through...--"

"… I was wary of engaging in any sort of savior complex; the incarcerated are most qualified to speak about their own experiences, but I wanted to tell people some of what I saw and heard and read about in these places. I had to get it out of me. And, given my time in law school and as a legal professional who has dealt in these systems, I felt I had the kind of background that was needed to do this telling. This wasn't a faceless black mass I was trying to humanize, these were specific stories I needed to get out of me and felt were especially compelling…"

"(Part I paragraph 1)"

"…The idea of police forces as little more than white militia employed to ensure a certain social stratification highlighted just how temporally ever-present police brutality is in American history. And I wanted to capture the intergenerationality of the national paroxysms, embodied in the riots and protests that followed so many of these killings."

"The Devil is busy here...The gangs, the drugs, all the evil that men do to each other here. Sometimes even..."

"(Part I paragraph 4)"

"I didn’t try to be a soul singer, a jazz singer, a blues singer – no category…My music is my expression of what I feel and believe in a moment."

"To be moved, to be moved constantly by your own songs. You need it to be in tune with them, and I don’t mean in tune musically, but I mean in tune with the lyrics of the songs, with the words of the songs, and with the meaning. You need to be in tune with all of that, and that takes a little bit of doing."

"Just seeing people getting cancer and dying from it, and me hearing that that's the stuff that we put inside of us is what's causing this cancer… it was my peoples who passed from cancer. I'm asking around like, "Where this cancer s--- coming from?" Everything we eat—the processed food and the stuff they put inside it."

"Animals should be treated the same as you would a kid. Would you want someone just to walk up and skin your kid? Hell no!"

"I'm a conscious eater, meaning I'm conscious about the things I put in my mouth. I know the ingredients in the food, I know the chemicals, if there are chemicals, I know what that cup is made of, and if I'm eating out of this plastic utensil, I know what it's doing. I'm a "conscious eater.""

"I sang it about soldiers, then, later, about gay men. It touches me deeply every time. I used to perform this song at Mr Henry’s and people would be totally silent. I knew it moved them."

"I hope that one day we will be seen for the people we are, not for our race, gender, age or nationality."

"I know what it is to go over the same songs over and over again, and to try to make them perfect. It’s interesting and it’s hard and it’s difficult at the same time…You have to stay on top of things."

"The core problem within the ghetto is the vicious circle created by the lack of decent housing, decent jobs and adequate education. The failure of these three fundamental institutions to work has led to alienation of the ghetto from the rest of the urban area as well as to deep political rifts between the two communities. In America we judge by American standards, and by this yardstick we find that the black man lives in incredibly inadequate housing, shabby shelters that are dangerous to mental and physical health and to life itself. [...] and highway clearance programs have forced black people more and more into congested pockets of the inner city. Since suburban zoning laws have kept out low-income housing, and the Federal Government has failed to pass open-occupancy laws, black people are forced to stay in the deteriorating ghettos. Thus crowding increases, and slum conditions worsen. [...] Here we begin to understand the pervasive, cyclic implications of institutional racism. Barred from most housing, black people are forced to live in segregated neighborhoods and with this comes de facto segregated schooling, which means poor education, which leads in turn to ill-paying jobs."

"To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. Across those tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face. Across those tracks was a world we could work in as maids, as janitors, as prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity. We could enter that world but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished. Living as we did-on the edge-we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us an oppositional world view-a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity."

"DeSean Jackson is still an NFL player, and—as a player for Washington, D.C.’s professional football team—will make a tremendous amount of money. He can keep his connections to his friends, he can live in the same neighborhood, if he wants, and downward mobility won’t be a pressing concern. For millions of more ordinary black Americans, however, the opposite is true. Even with more income and more education, they’re stuck in segregated neighborhoods. Yes, there isn’t much mobility for anyone, but that fact is especially true for blacks. Indeed, when someone says that America has a “,” this is what they mean: Whether times are good or bad, blacks remain at the bottom."

"(Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?) ...Because of “The Daily Show,” most of my reading time these days is consumed by journalists...Vann R. Newkirk; Jamelle Bouie; and Rembert Browne. All fantastic writers."

"[L]eaving home is hard, and the of wealth makes it even harder. [...] Just a quick comparison of black and white neighborhoods is enough to illustrate the particular challenges that face black families as they reach for middle class, or try to keep their position. The key fact is this: Even after you adjust for income and education, black Americans are more likely than any other group to live in neighborhoods with substantial pockets of poverty."

"All of which raises an obvious question: Why do blacks have a hard time leaving impoverished neighborhoods? [...] Once you grasp the staggering differences between black and white neighborhoods, it becomes much easier to explain a whole realm of phenomena. Take the achievement gap between middle-class black students and their white peers. It’s easy to look at this and jump to cultural explanations—that this is a function of black culture and not income or wealth. But, when we say middle-class black kids are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods, what we’re also saying is that they’re less likely to have s with professionals, and more likely to be exposed to violence and crime. This can have serious consequences. Youthful experimentation for a white teenager in a suburb might be smoking a joint in a friend’s attic. Youthful experimentation for a black teenager might be hanging out with gang members."

"[B]lack Americans live with a level of poverty that is simply unknown to the vast majority of whites. It’s tempting to attribute this to the income disparity between blacks and whites. Since blacks are more likely to be poor, it stands to reason that they’re more likely to live in poor neighborhoods. But the fact of large-scale neighborhood poverty holds true for higher-income black Americans as well. Middle-class blacks are far more likely than middle-class whites to live in areas with significant amounts of poverty. Among today’s cohort of middle- and upper-class blacks, about half were raised in neighborhoods of at least 20 percent poverty. Only 1 percent of today’s middle- and upper-class whites can say the same. In short, if you took two children—one white, one black—and gave them parents with similar jobs, similar educations, and similar values, the black child would be much more likely to grow up in a neighborhood with higher poverty, worse schools, and more violence. This is an outright disaster for income mobility. Given their circumstances, blacks face a reversal of their gains over the last generation. Simply put, the persistence of poor neighborhoods is a fact of life for the large majority of blacks; it’s been transmitted from one generation to the next, and shows little sign of changing."

"[L]eaving home is hard, and the of wealth makes it even harder."

"The difference for ordinary black Americans, as opposed to NFL stars, is that this has been a powerful driver of downward mobility. Just a quick comparison of black and white neighborhoods is enough to illustrate the particular challenges that face black families as they reach for middle class, or try to keep their position. The key fact is this: Even after you adjust for income and education, black Americans are more likely than any other group to live in neighborhoods with substantial pockets of poverty."

"[B]lack Americans live with a level of poverty that is simply unknown to the vast majority of whites. It’s tempting to attribute this to the income disparity between blacks and whites. Since blacks are more likely to be poor, it stands to reason that they’re more likely to live in poor neighborhoods. But the fact of large-scale neighborhood poverty holds true for higher-income black Americans as well. Middle-class blacks are far more likely than middle-class whites to live in areas with significant amounts of poverty. Among today’s cohort of middle- and upper-class blacks, about half were raised in neighborhoods of at least 20 percent poverty. Only 1 percent of today’s middle- and upper-class whites can say the same. In short, if you took two children—one white, one black—and gave them parents with similar jobs, similar educations, and similar values, the black child would be much more likely to grow up in a neighborhood with higher poverty, worse schools, and more violence. This is an outright disaster for income mobility. Given their circumstances, blacks face a reversal of their gains over the last generation. Simply put, the persistence of poor neighborhoods is a fact of life for the large majority of blacks; it’s been transmitted from one generation to the next, and shows little sign of changing."

"there is no national drive, no national politician saying the United States needs to construct much more housing than it does. And I think it has everything to do with how the party coalitions right now are what their nature is."