Brown-Eyed Views
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
— James Baldwin
“The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose. Any break from routine may herald for them unbearable news.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
“An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”
– Ta-Nehisi Coates
“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You hear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
“The man’ll shoot you in the face in Mississippi, and you turn around he’ll shoot you in the back here.”
— Fannie Lou Hamer, on Northern racism, speaking in NY
“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
― Langston Hughes
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“The colonization of the Southern economy by capitalists from the North gave lynching its most vigorous impulse. If Black people, by means of terror and violence, could remain the most brutally exploited group within the swelling ranks of the working class, the capitalists could enjoy a double advantage. Extra profits would result from the superexploitation of Black labor, and white workers’ hostilities toward their employers would be defused. White workers who assented to lynching necessarily assumed a posture of racial solidarity with the white men who were really their oppressors. This was a critical moment in the popularization of racist ideology.”
“In the case of the United States, Black and Native lives are systematically choked by an enduring white supremacy that thrives on oppression and settler colonialism, and is backed by drones, the dispossession of territory and identity to millions, mass incarceration, the un-peopleing of people, and resource grabs that deny that indigenous lives matter and that our planet matters.”
— Angela Y. Davis
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“When I’m asked about the relevance to black people of what I do, I take that as an affront. It presupposes that black people have never been involved in exploring the heavens, but this is not so. Ancient African empires — Mali, Songhai, Egypt — had scientists, astronomers. The fact is that space and its resources belong to all of us, not to any one group.”
— Mae Jemison
“Black is beautiful—which is to say that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths must be protected against modern surgery. We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self, our one of one, to defiling and plunder.”
– Ta-Nehisi Coates
“This is the basis, and I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the right of my people, who are still second-class citizens in this United States of America”
― Paul Robeson
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“How are the white folks treating you?” He looked at me and sneered.
“This is Alabama, son,” he said, though he seemed younger than I. “How do you think they’re treating us?”
― Eddy L. Harris, South of Haunted Dreams: A Memoir
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“Countermovements among racists and sexists and Nazifiers are just as relentless as dirt on a coffee table…Every housewife knows that if you don’t sooner or later dust…the whole place will be dirty again.”
“I’m just a loud-mouthed, middle-aged colored lady with a fused spine and three feet of intestines missing and a lot of people think I’m crazy. Maybe you do, too, but I never stop to wonder why I’m not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren’t like me.”
— Florynce Kennedy
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“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
— James Baldwin
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“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”
“As I have said elsewhere, it is not the destiny of black America to repeat white America’s mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life. If black men continue to do so, defining ‘femininity’ in its archaic European terms, this augurs ill for our survival as a people, let alone our survival as individuals. Freedom and future for blacks do not mean absorbing the dominant white male disease.”
“As black people, we cannot begin our dialogue by denying the oppressive nature of male privilege. And if black males choose to assume that privilege, for whatever reason, raping, brutalizing, and killing women, then we cannot ignore black male oppression. One oppression does not justify another.”
“Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.”
— Audre Lorde
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“If you’re black, you got to look at America a little bit different. You got to look at America like the uncle who paid for you to go to college, but who molested you.”
— Chris Rock
“To be Negro in America is to hope against hope.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
* * *
“Most Black lesbians were closeted, correctly recognizing the Black community’s lack of interest in our position, as well as the many more immediate threats to our survival as Black people in a racist society. It was hard enough to be Black, to be Black and female, to be Black and female, and gay. To be Black, female, gay, and out of the closet in a white environment, even to the extent of dancing in the Bagatelle, was considered by many Black lesbians to be simply suicidal.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
“Being black is one of the most extreme sports in America. We don’t need to invent new ways of risking our lives because the old ones have been working for decades.”
― Rudy Francisco, Helium
“I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive.”
— Harriet Tubman
“I always thought that would be really neat if black people ever got control of the United States we would, of course, tear down some of the statues because we just don’t like them…like all of Richmond would probably not have a statue standing.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking At The Harlem Renaissance Through Poems
“The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it – whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”
— Harper Lee
* * *
“It is impossible for any white person in the United States, no matter how sympathetic and broad, to realize what life would mean to him if his incentive to effort were suddenly snatched away. To the lack of incentive to effort, which is the awful shadow under which we live, may be traced the wreck and ruin of score of colored youth.”
“Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States, because the chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawn so wide and deep.”
“As a colored woman I may enter more than one white church in Washington without receiving that welcome which as a human being I have the right to expect in the sanctuary of God.”
— Mary Church Terrell
* * *
“There is also this to consider: The name Hitler does not offend a black South African because Hitler is not the worst thing a black South African can imagine. Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one Person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler. If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium’s King Leopold would come way before Hitler. If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson.”
— Trevor Noah
“I can imagine no more dissatisfied human being than an educated, cultured, and refined colored man in the United States.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
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“DuBois pointed out that in order to fully abolish the oppressive conditions produced by slavery, new democratic institutions would have to be created. Because this did not occur; black people encountered new forms of slavery—from debt peonage and the convict lease system to segregated and second-class education. The prison system continues to carry out this terrible legacy. It has become a receptacle for all of those human beings who bear the inheritance of the failure to create abolition democracy in the aftermath of slavery. And this inheritance is not only born by black prisoners, but by poor Latino, Native American, Asians, and white prisoners. Moreover, its use as such a receptacle for people who are deemed the detritus of society is on the rise throughout the world.”
“What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.”
— Angela Y. Davis
* * *
“There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.” (Equal Rights Convention, New York, 1867)
— Sojourner Truth
“To be black in America is a wild and endless assault on the senses. You can spend every day fighting off your spiritual and intellectual extinction.”
― Carvell Wallace
“If you’re colored, you get the short end of the stick. If you’re a woman, you get the short end of the stick. So what do we get for being colored and women?”
― Sherri L. Smith, Flygirl
“What keeps a poor child in Appalachia poor is not what keeps a poor child in Chicago poor – even if from a distance, the outcomes look the same. And what keeps an able-bodied black woman poor is not what keeps a disabled white man poor, even if the outcomes look the same.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race
“To be a black male is to be always at war, and no flight to the county can save us, because even there we are met by the assupmtion of violence, by the specter of who we might turn on next.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
“I’m dying twice as fast as any other American between eighteen and thirty-five. This disturbs me, but I try not to show it in public.”
― Essex Hemphill
“You don’t participate in your own dehumanization. You don’t give them the power to determine your actions when you’re not doing anything wrong. To alter your behavior, to comply to their wishes, to give in to their desire to be satisfied, to be comforted, to have their unwarranted fears placated by you justifying your existence. You just don’t do it. It’s against any principle of human dignity.”
— Christian Cooper, on why he wouldn’t give his name to a white woman who called the police on him and falsely accused him of attacking her
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