African Americans

"We make memories every day and everywhere we go, it's just shenanigans. Something always happens. I think the secret to a really great friendship is just creating fun memories whenever you're with that person. Bella is a surprise every day. That's the best part of our friendship. She's very bubbly and bright, and I'm more mellow, so we are kind of like our characters in a sense. We fit together so well because whatever I lack she has and whatever she lacks I have."

"…I’m the ‘Southern police’ on most of the projects I do…Contrary to what many people seem to believe, there is no ‘stock Southerner.’ In fact, there is more variation in us than in other places…this well-known actress was playing a Southern woman, and she was cerebral. She was acting from the chest up, when she should have been acting from the bottom. A Southern woman is not who you play. A Southern woman is who you are."

"I didn’t think that I was powerless…But I didn’t think that I was powerful."

"Zendaya is more high-fashion. The hair to me on her is making her a little more boho. Like I feel like she smells like patchouli oil. Or weed."

"It was a gift to have something else that I was passionate about, because at the end of the day, it comes down to the work and the art."

"Oh, when danger comes to you You know I'll stand beside ya 'Cause ain't nobody keeping it so cool I always find a way A way out of the fire But don't tell nobody Tell nobody I'm not perfect So many things Wanna tell you But I (I keep it undercover) Livin' my life on red alert Doin' my thing, gon' make it work Know I'm the realest Baby, I'm fearless But I always got your back Nobody can do it like I can I gotta find out who I am Ain't gonna worry about me It's all part of the plan"

"…as an actor, trying to do the best you can on a film, you think, do I say thank you or fuck you?"

"The reason why I chose not to do the Aaliyah movie had nothing to do with the haters or people telling me that I couldn't do it, I wasn't talented enough, or I wasn't black enough. It had absolutely nothing to do with that. The main reasons were that the production value wasn't there, there were complications with the music rights, and I just felt like it wasn't being handled delicately considering the situation."

"The eyes of love are watching you As you go from day to day The hands of love will catch you When you fall along the way My arms will hold and be with you Your whole life through 'Cause I am love And I'm in love with you."

"…You consciously weave certain things in. Then some things are unconsciously woven into the book, both because you write one poem at a time but also because the motivations for each poem exist within the world of that poem. They subconsciously transcend the world of that poem and go to other places…"

"…it’s really easy to get caught up in how you’re hurt and not really think about whom you are actually hurting. At football games, they kneel, but they’re not kneeling for domestic violence in the NFL. They’ve had a huge rate of domestic violence, intensely physical domestic violence that has become public, and you know that’s the tip of the iceberg. That’s not even talking about accusations of sexual assault. It’s not talking about the actual murdering. This is part of the culture where men, who have been professional athletes, have done things. We don’t talk about that. They aren’t kneeling for that."

"I like to think that the poem is trying to hit you in the gut. I like to think that the poem comes from someplace [of] deep and intense emotion and [is] this thing that I can't run away from..."

"…I like to think that I'm just part of the struggle because we all sort of exist in this thing, trying to figure out what it means to be human day-to-day and what it means to have, like, suffered and made other people suffer."

"…in talking it over with Negroes, I find that the tale is so old and so well known that it is almost folklore. It has many variations: sometimes it is the woman’s brother, husband, son, lover, preacher, beloved master, or even her father, mother, sister, or daughter who is killed. A Negro sociologist tells me that there are literally hundred of these stories. Anyone could have written it up at any time."

"Manners were something that people who don’t have, but admire, resent not having."

"a ‘modern’ woman who smokes, wears her dresses short, does not believe in religions, churches and the like, and feels that people of the artistic type have a definite chance to help solve the race problem."

"Many cities are predominantly white in America, many larger cities; but with Pittsburgh, the whiteness there is a bit thicker, that it’s almost atmospherically white, spiritually white…"

"…You have to intentionally seek out community. You have to intentionally seek out spaces that are comfortable, that are welcoming. And I think that intentionality just bleeds into the work of people who are from Pittsburgh. It's not a place where you could just laze into blackness. You have to be hyper-cognizant of it…"

"I have a deep fear of hurting people…I don’t want to be seen as this kind of person. I don’t want my work to be seen as this type of work."

"I’m not this MFA or this academic. I didn’t come through a New York Times or New Yorker pipeline or whatever. I started a blog…Now I’ve written for some of those publications I’ve named, but I wasn’t brought up and groomed that way. Since I haven’t been, it would be fraudulent for me to try to be less accessible just because … that’s just not me."

"…I’m hoping that readers create their own relationship between themselves, the title and the text, but I will say that it’s important to remember that each of us is a blade of grass, not the lawn itself."

"If you take a glass bottle and toss it up into the air so that when it hits the earth it shatters against the ground, and then you take the shards and glue them back together in the shape of a bird, then you no longer have a bottle, you’ve made something new. Any parts of my personal history I use in my fiction are only interesting to me as the rawest of raw material that I’m shaping into the form of a bird."

"…Blackness for me is sort of like air, I’m constantly perceiving it, but not really thinking about it as my mind is on more immediate concerns. And then sometimes I’m forced into a hyper-awareness of it and that awareness is at times pleasant, at times noxious…"

"I think that part of the problem is that a lot of black writers are … satisfied with being successful outside of what you’d call literary fiction. And if you take that satisfaction, you don’t get in the club. You have to write literary fiction to get in the club. And there aren’t that many black writers that they’ve allowed in the club to choose from…"

"… I think in real life we do. And I think a lot of times, the benefits are in our face, but we don't necessarily see the suffering that we are carrying with and the way that it ripples out and causes damage through generations…"

"He’s hitting hard against what the American societal definition of what being a black man is and also a diasporic Nigerian conception of what being a black man is."

"It troubles me that our worth is measured against what white people in power care about on a given day, week, month. The stories of my people are evergreen. I will write about them for a lifetime."

"We don’t even have the power to build a bubble, right? That’s the ultimate story of being who we are and writing about ourselves. We don’t even have the authority to create that bubble."

"One of the things I like to say to people is that we think that broadening access in any realm — we do this with everything, by the way. It’s such an American way to approach the world. We think that broadening access will broaden access on the terms of the people who have benefited from it being narrowed, which is just so counterintuitive. Broadening access doesn’t mean that everybody has the experience that I, privileged person, had in the discourse. Broadening it means that we are all equally uncomfortable, right? That’s actually what pluralism and plurality is. It isn’t that everybody is going to come in and have the same comforts that privilege and exclusion had extended to a small group of people. It’s that now everybody sits at the table, and nobody knows the exact right thing to say about the other people."

"The sometimes-negative aspect of growing up in this country without a firm cultural basis is that your entire being becomes predicated on satisfying others. And I discovered that's what I was doing…"

"I want to be able to show up and raise the hell at the precise right moment that might tip the scales in a way that will make something a little more clear, or a little bit more just, for people I care about…"

"A metaphor is a sign of desperation when we need another world to describe what we are feeling. Metaphors are about desperation and safety. We call out to metaphor because a metaphor makes us feel safe."

"The hyper-visibility means that you both can't hide, but also never really feel completely seen by authority figures and by your peer groups. Trapped in that space of hyper-visibility, I think, is where we wrestle with the ideas of, 'What part of me matters?'"

"We're at an era where a lot of people are beginning to step in, in a really firm way, into their identities. Whether people are saying...they're born with one sex, they say: I'm actually another gender—that's who I am; or people are claiming their cultural heritage in a more profound way than they have in the past...For any number of reasons, we have an opportunity to construct our identities that are more honest and open and true to who we are than what we've been handed at birth."

"take Jericho Brown, telling too much necessary truth in all his work, but especially "Bullet Points," on the violence black men and women experience at the hands of cops. "I promise that if you hear/Of me dead anywhere near / A cop, then that cop killed me." I heard Jericho read this live and found myself on the edge of my seat, my fingers curled into tight, sweaty fists as I tried to absorb the pain wrapped in the intense beauty of his words."

"Kendi is so unbelievably stupid, mindbogglingly dogmatic, boring and limited in range that I would much rather read MLK [Martin Luther King] than have to endure sitting down with Kendi. I teach Kendi because he is useful. Where he is useful is there are no nuances in him. None whatsoever. No ambiguities. Everything is racism, all the time. I did learn something very interesting from Kendi. There's one line that appears in his two major books. This is what my life has come to, that I have read the two major books, "Stamped from the Beginning" and "How to be an antiracist". It reappears each time, and the line is "There is nothing wrong with black people." I think that line explains why Kendi is writing, and why white people buy Kendi's books. It's to be reassured that racism explains everything, and that there isn't one drop, one percent, one element, of black responsibility in black life outcomes today."

"A poem should go beyond what you already know, and if it’s going to go beyond what you already know, a poem might say something that begins to have you question what side you’re on, which, in turn, might begin to have an audience question what side you’re on…"

"What happens at the beginning of your poem has to—because it’s a poem—be transformed by the end of your poem. So if the triggering moment for the beginning of your poem is a known political moment, I am fine with that, that’s great. But as I’m reading, I expect it to change because that was just the trigger…"

"I also love the way lists and repetitions can serve as a comfort. We can predict a repetition and that’s soothing, but we can also alter it to create something new, which, in my case, often produces a joy."

"Growing up, I experienced this viscerally because my parents are from Nigeria, I was born and raised in America and my parents tried to hand over that identity card and that didn’t fit me because I was growing up in a context in which their identity didn’t necessarily line up with how I saw myself…"

"It is the hardest thing to take chaos and make order of it. Poetry is a veil in front of a heart beating at a very fast pace."

"The farther away you move from our dominant assumptions about who should have expertise, generally speaking, the more you have to prove that you have a legitimate claim to whatever you're speaking on. For black women that means we're dealing with racist ideas and stereotypes about who's knowledge is valuable, but we're also dealing with gender stereotypes about who should be allowed to speak and to lead…"

"I woke up in the middle of the night to the news that Chadwick had passed. And at first I thought it was a nightmare. Like many people, I was shocked. And then of course I came to see that it was real. And then I saw that he died of colon cancer. And my first thought was, why him? Why not me? It was really—it was crushing. It was crushing because of how much he had given the world, how much I adored him. It was crushing because I know how beloved he was and still is. And it still is crushing... I don’t even know if I can even—as you know, Amy, I don’t even know if it can even be described in words what Black Panther meant, what T’Challa meant, what many of those incredible characters meant, what Wakanda meant, what Wakanda still means to black people. And particularly those of us who are really striving to be antiracist... And like other black people who went to see the film and just as nonblack people, it gave me the ability to really step outside of myself, step outside of my world and imagine what’s possible. And there is nothing more radical and critical to transforming the world than a radical imagination. Of thinking about what is possible. I think Black Panther gave that to so many people."

"Part of the reason so many Americans are so defensive is because we’ve been led to believe that racist is a fixed category, that it’s a tattoo, it’s a label. Of course they’re going to say, “I’m not a racist, I’m not a bad person.” But racist is describing what you’re saying in the moment."

"Certainly, before colonization, some of the greatest and most powerful and wealthiest and most technologically and intellectually advanced empires in the world were in Africa, from Ghana, Mali and Songhai...We’re not taught about precolonial West Africa. We’re not even taught about Africa today!... And I don’t think we should focus on Europe because that is a demonstration to me of racism."

"As a father, as a girl dad, the portrayal of women in Black Panther is almost certainly what I admired the most, from the chief technology officer to even the baddest person on the film, who to me was the general, who was my favorite character and certainly my wife’s favorite character. But then also, I just want to again emphasize that this is possible. We currently have a tech industry where women and particularly women of color are far and away underrepresented or imagine that it’s not their place or imagine that they don’t have the intellectual capacity. And these are all sexist and racist lies. And women, particularly women of color, can be the chief technology officer of the baddest place, I should say the most technologically advanced sort of companies or places on earth. That’s possible, if we can create that type of sort of society."

"I think most Americans, without recognizing it, say and believe both racist and antiracist ideas. What I'm seeking to do is get them to recognize those racist ideas, get them to essentially get rid of them and essentially strive to be antiracist, strive to see the racial groups as equals."

"Reverend Barber, at one point during the debate, a fly landed on Pence's head for nearly two-and-a-half minutes, prompting widespread commentary online. Professor Ibram X. Kendi, author of the best-selling book How to Be an Antiracist, tweeted, "As soon as Pence started denying the existence of systemic racism, the fly got him!" Amy Goodman You know, I couldn’t help but go to the Book of Exodus, where it talked about where God said, "If you don't let my people go, I'm going to cause flies to come as a sign of what’s wrong. But I won’t let the flies be on the people, but the fly will be a symbol that you're just wrong. You're lying. Let my people go." And Trump and Pence need to let the people go. They’ve been holding poor and low-wealth people hostage, essential workers hostage. It's time for a change in this country."

"The working class in the United States has never been united; it’s always been divided along the lines of race. … Racism and capitalism emerged at the same time, in 15th-century western Europe, and they’ve reinforced each other from the beginning."

"As soon as Pence started denying the existence of systemic racism, the fly got him!"