Black quotes
3.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"That's a big fear, right, and when I talk with black pastors, the same thing: If we try to have this move towards interracial congregations, whites will just dominate then. There are so many more of them, and they're used to being in the position of power. So they'll just take over, and we'll lose the one thing we do have."
"I see this in the way that sermons are preached. How would you give a Black Nationalist speech or campaign for the Republicans when you're an integrated congregation? It doesn't happen."
"I know how hard it is to be a woman, especially a black woman."
"I think often if people don't have a lot of experience with a particular type of person or a particular type of brain, they can make dangerous assumptions. That's one of the reasons that I'm so interested in contradicting and troubling held thoughts about black women."
"I wanted [the book 'There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé?'] to be colorful. I wanted it to be evocative. I wanted a figure of a black woman that the reader has to confront."
"I don't claim to say, "All black women are like me," because they're not."
"There's so much about the strong black woman stereotype that makes us forget that we do need and deserve help and care."
"It's always hard for me to find a therapist who is a black woman or even a woman of color. It's something that we've always been told is not for us. It's top down."
"I don't think that there are as many black women or women of color becoming psychiatrists, so we can't find them and then we feel looked at and studied and that's part of what is damaging to us. It's hard to find therapy that is actually a tool for your own liberation. I think we can be really distrustful."
"It's been interesting to look back on those works [I've done previously] and see all the things that Beyoncé has done and become for us in the meantime, because back then, folks were like, "Why Beyoncé? I don't get why she is kind of the symbol for black womanhood.""
"There was something about Beyoncé that felt like a vessel, I guess, that I could kind of impose all of these feelings and thoughts onto. I was drawn to a little bit of a dichotomy between the glamour and celebrity and the very deep and complex legacy of black women, and what that means in terms of performance."
"I try to convey what it feels like and sounds like and smells like and looks like inside of my particular skin, to move through the world as a black American woman in her mid-twenties."
"So much of the world and the systems that we live within are made to keep us from feeling like we're free. The way that black women in American came to be is just diametrically opposed to being free."
"All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them."
"I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man. I had to show the world."
"We followed the Honorable Elijah Mohammed, who is the boss. And we don't waste a lot of time arguin' about a dead black man, Malcolm X, when the whites are our common enemies."
"Be loud, be pretty and keep their black-hatin' asses in their chairs"
"Who would have thought when they came to the fight? That they'd witness the launching of a human satellite."
"I want to be the first black man on the moon"
"Everything the black people are doing comes from the Honorable Elijah Mohammed. They are black now, they don't want to be called Negroes. This come from the Honorable Elijah Mohammed."
