304 Quotes About African-americans

My ancestors in this hemisphere were, by law, chattel slaves. In the U.S., they were chattel slaves for two and a half centuries—at least 10 generations. I used to think I knew what that meant. Now I realize that I can’t begin to imagine the many terrible things that it must have done to them. How did they survive it all and keep their humanity? Certainly, they were never intended to keep it, just as we weren’t.

If you believe in a cause, be willing to stand up for that cause with a million people or by yourself.

Thus far I had outwitted him, and I triumphed over it. Who can blame slaves for being cunning? They are constantly compelled to resort to it. It is the only weapon of the weak and oppressed against the strength of their tyrants.

It seems that wherever the Black body is present, whether in solitary or a multitude, whites feel threatened, perhaps by the ghosts of their own sins for which they have never atoned.

He knows full well what she's thinking. He's waiting for her to say it out loud and violate the unspoken contract that covers white people who are doing everything short of tossing around the n-word in public. And hell, some even want that to be deniable.

Did Dolezal really fool those black folks around her? I have a strange feeling she didn't, that many simply humored her. You have to do this with white people, from time to time.

Who would dare admit a longing for a White nation so full of hate that it drove its citizens of color to madness, to death or to exile? How to confess even to one's ownself, that our eyes, historically customed to granite buildings, wide paved avenues, chromed cars, and brown, black, beige, pink, and white-skinned people, often ached for those familiar sights?

If I knew anything about being black in America it was that nothing was guaranteed, you couldn't count on a thing, and and all that was certain for most of us was a black death. In my mind, a black death was a slow death, the accumulation of insults, injuries, neglect, second-rate health care, high blood pressure and stress, no time for self-care, no time to sigh, and in the end, the inevitable, the erasing of memory.

Stokes started by explaining how often the term "servant" is used as a euphemism for "slave" in New England and how there is a presumption that Africans here were somehow "smarter" and treated better than those in the South. This misperception, he pushed, is because people don't want to remember the dehumanization. Without hesitating, he went on to say, Slavery is violent, grotesque, vulgar, and we are all implicated in how it denigrates humanity.