Quote collection
166 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system."
"Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have. . . This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down."
"I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color."
"In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black."
"My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced."
"There's a boom in genealogy now. With ancestry.com and other sites digitizing so many of the records, you can now find things in a few minutes that used to take months."
"The Dominican Republic says 'We're black behind the ears.' And in Mexico, 'there's a black grandma in the closet.' They know, they've just been intermarrying for a long time. But if we did the DNA of everyone in Mexico a whole lot of people would have a whole lot of black in them."
"It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that."
"The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again."
"When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied."
"Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time."
"One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you."
"In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence."
"Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology."
"My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I've got a 50 percent chance of living a long life like him."
"What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories."
"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."
"The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched."
"My mom, God rest her soul - she liked nicknames. In the womb she named me Skip. There was another black guy in Piedmont, W.Va., and his name was Skip. They called him Big Skip, and I was Little Skip."
"Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro."