Black Boy Quotes

Bodybuilding has been the tool that single-handedly taught a little black boy from the projects to use his mind to achieve success. it taught me to see things for what they can be. I had 17-inch arms; I imagined them to be 24 inches. The power of my mind allowed me to achieve what I imagined. ~ Kai Greene

Philately is normally a boys' hobby but for some reason it was in vogue at my junior school. Between the ages of eight and ten I collected avidly. I'd pore over my Stanley Gibbons book, obsessively checking my collection's value. I always hoped I'd stumble across a really valuable one, a Penny Black or an Inverted Jenny, but it wasn't to be. ~ Sophie Ellis-Bextor

I've had this sensibility since I was a child. If there was a black boy in the school, I was the friend. If there was an effeminate guy, I was the friend. If there was somebody who was poor like me, I was the friend. ~ Riccardo Tisci

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are. ~ Toni Morrison

Just as some cultures have a hundred words for 'snow,' there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lie awake at night. ~ Saeed Jones

I remember that rape case you defended, but I missed the point. You love justice, all right. Abstract justice written down item by item on a brief - nothing to do with that black boy, you just like a neat brief. His cause interfered with your orderly mind, and you had to work order out of disorder. It's a compulsion with you, and now it's coming home to you - ~ Harper Lee

She lived with the doctor on Via Po, in a gloomy, dark apartment, barely warmed in winter by just a small Franklin stove, and she no longer threw out anything, because everything might eventually come in handy: not even the cheese rinds or the foil on chocolates, with which she made silver balls to be sent to missions to free a little black boy. ~ Primo Levi

And the whole thing is that you're treated like a step-child. Here it was down here, everything in the black, because they were stealing, basically. Stealing from us old country boys down here. ~ Waylon Jennings

When now we turn and look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five houses of prostitutes, - two of blacks and three of whites; and in one of the houses of the whites a worthless black boy was harbored too openly two years ago; so he was hanged for rape. And here, too, is the high whitewashed fence of the "stockade," as the county prison is called; the white folks say it is ever full of black criminals, - the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. The world needs saving precisely because of the actions of these same men and women. I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful - the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. And this is not reducible to just you - the women around you must be responsible for their bodies in a way that you never will know. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I've got a Ferrari 430. It's black. I don't know what it cost but it wasn't cheap. I bought it because I was being a boy. It's fast and looks good. ~ Jermain Defoe

No matter was the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I wondered if there had been a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination. ~ Richard Wright

little black boy on the bus with his toy dinosaur, his eyes wide & endless

his dreams possible, pulsing, & right there ~ Danez Smith

She knew all about the cops and their trigger fingers and their predilection for dealing with those who would attack their brethren. Her father had drummed such stories into her from a young age; more so into Whiz, who bore the burden of being a black boy about to grow into a black teen. "If the police even look at you funny," Dad had said, "you hit the ground and put your hands over your head. Don't talk back. Don't try to run. Don't try to explain. They're just looking for an excuse to shoot you. Don't give it to them. ~ Barry Lyga

What I'm asking is will watching The Discovery
Channel with my young black boy instead
of the news coverage of the riot funerals riot arrests
riot nothing changes riots be enough to keep him
from harm? ~ Jennifer Givhan

I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful
the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Then began an experience that turned my life around-working on a book with a black kid as hero. None of the manuscripts I'd been illustrating featured any black kids-except for token blacks in the background. My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along. Years before I had cut from a magazine a strip of photos of a little black boy. I often put them on my studio walls before I'd begun to illustrate children's books. I just loved looking at him. This was the child who would be the hero of my book. ~ Ezra Jack Keats

Yes beyonce, thank you very very much!!!

Growing up wasn't easy for me, even as a boy, then as a black boy, then it was even harder as a black boy who lives in Africa. You might think that white privilege is more prevalent in America but no, it is worse here in Africa were white people are literally worshiped as gods.

While growing up as a boy in my teens, i had serious self esteem issues, i didn't like the color of my skin, i didn't like my hair, i didn't like my butt, and i was a boy!!! can you believe it? in 2007 i even tried bleaching my skin, lucky for me i bought a fake bleaching cream, translation, it didn't work. I dyed my hair blonde several times.

But after a while i started to get my self esteem in place, the fact that i had so many white folks as friends at that time didn't help, truth is most white people living here in Africa claim not to be racist but when you catch that stare, hear that comment, see the way they react, you can smell racism all over them. I can give you a simple example, I had a white friend years ago who was an exec at a big oil company here in Nigeria, I had just graduated and needed a job, I spoke to him about it and y'all wont believe what he suggested, well, he suggested I work as his steward.

You see, a lot of Nigerians will jump at it, but i smelt racism all over that offer and i wasn't gonna be a slave to a white man who still had slave-owner tendencies, he totally undermined my degree and fel ~ Joseph Ejiro

I am not a cynic. I love you, I love the world and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful-the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. And this is not reducible to just you-the women around you must be responsible for their bodies in a way that you never will know. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

My story starts with my dad, a black boy born to a single mother in a small town in North Carolina. It starts with my parents meeting in Washington, D.C., in the '60s, at a time of incredible activism. ~ Cory Booker

He was looking at Mr. Nancy, an old black man with a pencil moustache, in his check sports jacket and his lemon yellow gloves, riding a carousel lion as it rose and lowered, high in the air; and, at the same time, in the same place, he saw a jeweled spider as high as a horse, its eyes an emerald nebula, strutting, staring down at him; and simultaneously he was looking at an extraordinarily tall man with teak colored skin and three sets of arms, wearing a flowing ostrich-feather headdress, his face painted with red stripes, riding an irritated golden lion, two of his six hands holding on tightly to the beast's mane; and he was also seeing a young black boy, dressed in rags, his left foot all swollen and crawling with black flies; and last of all, and behind all these things, Shadow was looking at a tiny brown spider, hiding under a withered ochre leaf. Shadow saw all these things, and he knew they were the same thing. ~ Neil Gaiman

What could be worse than dead? But all around him, the evidence was clear. Only weeks before, the NYPD had shot down a fifteen-year-old black boy, a student, for next to nothing. The shooting had started the riots, pitting young black men and some black women against the police force. The news made it sound like the fault lay with the blacks of Harlem. The violent, the crazy, the monstrous black people who had the gall to demand that their children not be gunned down in the streets. ~ Yaa Gyasi

The problem is that television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a black Muslim lesbian. ~ Jeremy Clarkson

I guess cause i'm black boy, I'm supposed to say 'peace', sing songs, and get capped on. ~ Tupac Shakur

When Michael Jackson, a poor black boy who grew up to be a rich, white woman, married Elvis Presley's daughter the Scientologist. Makes you proud to be an American, dudn't it? ~ Molly Ivins

There's a black boy dead for no reason, and the man responsible for it's dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time, Mr Finch. Let the dead bury the dead. ~ Harper Lee

Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky
And I must think a little of the past:
When I was ten I told a stinking lie
That got a black boy whipped ... ~ Allen Tate

Oh! thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear! ~ Herman Melville

Three-and-a-half-month-old infants already seem to exhibit the other-race effect. In a study at the University of Kentucky, white babies were very good at distinguishing faces with 100 percent Caucasian features from faces that had been graphically morphed to include features that were 70 percent white and 30 percent Asian. They couldn't do the reverse: They could not tell 100 percent Asian faces from those that were morphed to include 30 percent white features. In other words, they could detect small differences between white and not-quite-white faces, but not the same kinds of differences between Asian and not-quite-Asian faces.
Lawrence A. Hirschfeld of the University of Michigan did some of the pioneering work on how early in life children begin to understand race. He showed children of ages three, four, and seven, a picture of "Johnny:" a chubby black boy in a police uniform, complete with whistle and toy gun. He then showed them pictures of adults who shared two of Johnny's three main traits of race, body build, and uniform. Prof. Hirschfeld prepared all combinations - policemen who were fat but were white, thin black policemen, etc. - and asked the children which was Johnny's daddy or which was Johnny all grown up. Even the three-year-olds were significantly more likely to choose the black man rather than the fat man or the policeman. They knew that weight and occupation can change but race is permanent.
In 1996, after 15 years of studying children and race, ~ Jared Taylor

It's another to the body, and it looks like Louis is going down.' My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trip of a man running through slimy swamps. It was a white woman slapping her maid for being forgetful. ~ Maya Angelou

And we are put on earth a little space,
that we may learn to bear the beams of love;
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove. ~ William Blake

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks. ~ Benjamin E. Mays

If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything is tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?" Joseph Knect said to his Music Master "there is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend rather, you should long for perfection in yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived not taught ~ Hermann Hesse

I had a dream about you. You had no skin or muscle on your face, and to try to conceal your bare skull you liberally applied lipstick and makeup. Your birthday was coming up, and I knew you were probably sensitive about parties that emphasize the aging process, so I decided to box up your gift in a coffin and wrap it with black wrapping paper. I got you the best gift ever too - a hooker, who happened to be dead, because that enabled me to procure a sizeable discount. ~ Dora J. Arod

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. ~ Cornel West

To allow injustice and inequality invites a Ferguson to your community. We must stand together, black, white, brown, red, and yellow and fight for justice and equality for all. It's the only way to avoid more Fergusons. ~ Jesse Jackson

There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red. ~ Mark Rothko

After Obama became president, I realized that black people could not have put him in the White House - it had to be a collective effort of everybody in the country. ~ Tyler Perry

The sight of a fair young girl, as frank and wholesome as the Sierra breezes, had stirred his volcanic, untamed heart to its very depths. When she had vanished from his sight, he realized that a crisis had come in his life, and that neither silver speculations nor any other questions could ever be of such importance to him as this new and all-absorbing one. The love which had sprung up in his heart was not the sudden, changeable fancy of a boy, but rather the wild, fierce passion of a man of strong will and imperious temper. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I do not like the killers, and the killing bravely and well crap. I do not like the bully boys, the Teddy Roosevelt's, the Hemingways, the Ruarks. They are merely slightly more sophisticated versions of the New Jersey file clerks who swarm into the Adirondacks in the fall, in red cap, beard stubble and taut hero's grin, talking out of the side of their mouths, exuding fumes of bourbon, come to slay the ferocious white-tailed deer. It is the search for balls. A man should have one chance to bring something down. He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and gouted excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to go do it again, with a bigger beast. ~ John D. MacDonald

Rock and roll is about having a good time, so no matter
where you are right now blast some music and forget
about lifes problems. ~ Andy Biersack

No one gets out of this world alive...except astronauts. ~ Stewart Stafford

I am very happy here [on Cuba], but I feel I have work to do in the United States. It's where I can identify with the total world struggle for socialism. But I think as a North American, as a Black North American, I have certain understandings - certain contributions - to make that are unique to the North Amerian experience. ~ Huey Newton

Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected. ~ Robert Frank

Most stick people are black. ~ Demetri Martin

I was not athletically inclined. I was very quiet, introverted, non-confrontational. My three older brothers were athletes - basketball, football - but I was kind of a momma's boy. Then one day, my brother Roger encouraged me to go to the boxing gym with him. I tried the gloves on, and it just felt so natural. ~ Sugar Ray Leonard

I sha'n't let my prisoners go as easily as all that!' she said. 'Make my hair grow as thick and as black as yours, or else your husbands shall never see daylight again.' 'That is quite simple,' replied the elder sister; 'only you must do as we did - and perhaps you won't like the treatment.' 'If you can bear it, of course I can,' answered the witch. And so the girls told her they had first smeared their heads with pitch and then laid hot stones upon them. 'It is very painful,' said they, 'but there is no other way that we know of. And in order to make sure that all will go right, one of us will hold you down while the other pours on the pitch.' And so they did; and the elder sister let down her hair till it hung over the witch's eyes, so that she might believe it was her own hair growing. Then the other brought a huge stone, and, in short, there was an end of the witch. The sisters were savages who had never seen a missionary. ~ Andrew Lang

They had assumed the attack would be just another barely noted, barely investigated skirmish in South Central-- in short, a typical gang case-- until word got back to them that they had killed a police officer's son. The case was eminently solvable-- once the right kind of pressure was applied. Lyle Prideaux had called Skaggs "a hard man." But he was not exactly hard. He as just unequivocal. In his hands, the murders were elevated in law to what they were in fact: Atrocities that must be answered for every single time.

The world wasn't watching. The public, his superiors, and a large share of the country's thinking classes gave only glancing notice to the battle Skaggs had devoted his life to. But Skaggs didn't care; Skaggs turned his back to the parade.

And just as it is impossible to imagine that things in the South would not have been different if the legal system had operated differently-- had black men's lives, for example, been afforded profound value as measured by the response of legal authorities-- it is impossible to imagine that the thousands of young men who died on the streets of Los Angeles County during Skaggs's career would have done so had their killers anticipated a "John Skaggs Special" in every case.

If every murder and every serious assault against a black man on the streets were investigated with Skaggs's ceaseless vigor and determination-- investigated as if one's own child were the victim, or as if we, as a society, cou ~ Jill Leovy

Strigoi have red eyes, " I explained. "Do his eyes look red?"
The boy leaned forward. "No. They're brown. "
"What else do you know about Strigoi?" I asked.
"They have fangs like us, " the boy replied.
"Do you have fangs?" I asked Dimitri in a singsong voice. I had a feeling this was already-covered territory, but it took on a new feel when asked from a child's perspective. Dimitri smiled--a full, wonderful smile that caught me off guard.
"Okay, Jonathan, " said his mother anxiously. "You asked. Let's go now. "
"Strigoi are super strong, " continued Jonathan, who possibly aspired to be a future lawyer. "Nothing can hurt them. " Jonathan fixed Dimitri with a piercing gaze. "Are you super strong? Can you be hurt?"
"Of course I can, " replied Dimitri. "I'm strong, but all sorts of things can still hurt me. "
And then, being Rose Hathaway, I said something I really shouldn't have to the boy. "You should go punch him and find out. " Jonathan's mother screamed again, but he was a fast little bastard, eluding her grasp. He ran up to Dimitri before anyone could stop him--well, I could have--and pounded his tiny fist against Dimitri's knee. Then, with the same reflexes that allowed him to dodge enemy attacks, Dimitri immediately feinted falling backward, as though Jonathan had knocked him over. Clutching his knee, Dimitri groaned as though he were in terrible pain. Several people laughed, and by then, one of the other guardians had caught ~ Richelle Mead

Bodybuilders party a lot, and once, in Gold's
the gym in Venice, California, where all the top guys train there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

Three words were scrawled in black ink at the bottom of the page: Find the necklace. ~ Lindsay Marie Miller

I reach across my bed, half expecting to be greeted by Blake's green eyes and warm smile, but grab only folds of comforter. I am alone. The realization is met with the same ache I've felt since leaving Blake. It isn't disappointment exactly. It's more visceral than that. I don't want to be one of those girls who think they're in love with a boy just because they hooked up. So there. I am not in love with Blake Willliams.
I just miss him is all. ~ Talia Vance

And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In ~ Mat Johnson

Laura decided to send a cable to Lady Honoria after all, on the chance that she might still reach her in Baden-Baden. But while she was planning what to say, she felt, all of a sudden, the room start to spin about her, dizzying her, so that she fell back across the bed and across the pillows wondering what was happening to her until everything went as pitch-black as night and she sank down and down and down into a dark, endless tunnel. ~ Rosemary Rogers

He roused from a joyous dream of feasting, of drinking blood and sucking warm marrow from the bone. His sons and daughters swarmed like ants upon the surface of the Earth, ripe in their terror, delectable in their anguish. He swept them into his mouth and their insides ran in black streams between his lips and matted his beard. This sweet dream rapidly slipped away as he stretched and assessed his surroundings. He shambled forth from the great cavern in the mountain that had been his home for so long. ~ Laird Barron

I cannot agree with those who think of the Bill of Rights as an 18th century straitjacket, unsuited for this age ... The evils it guards against are not only old, they are with us now, they exist today. ~ Hugo Black

I have to find her. I check out hiding places in the lanes, behind bushes. A place where a boy could pull in a girl for a quick kiss. But there's nobody. ~ Carolyn Marsden

Despite what you've read, your sadness is not beautiful. No one will see you in the bookstore, curled up with your Bukowski, and want to save you.
Stop waiting for a salvation that will not come from the grey-eyed boy looking for an annotated copy of Shakespeare,
for an end to your sadness in Keats.
He coughed up his lungs at 25, and flowery words cannot conceal a life barely lived.
Your life is fragile, just beginning, teetering on the violent edge of the world.
Your sadness will bury you alive, and you are the only one who can shovel your way out with hardened hands and ragged fingernails, bleeding your despair into the unforgiving earth.
Darling, you see, no heroes are coming for you. Grab your sword, and don your own armor. ~ Emily Palermo

Naomi and Turner, even Ronnie, they all see this is as black and white. Good guys verses bad guys. But I learned a long time ago that the world only functions in shades of gray. ~ C.M. Stunich

It was the very fact of the note, stuck on my windshield on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, hundreds of miles from where Fatback had lived and, apparently, died. That, and the small deerskin pouch of tobacco that was tied to it. Fatback was a black Lab - a good dog - who had belonged to Dan, an elderly Lakota man who lived far out on the Dakota plains. Years before, as a result of a book of elders' memories I had done with students at Red Lake, Dan had contacted me to come out to his home to speak with him. His request was vague, and I had been both skeptical and apprehensive. But, reluctantly, I had gone, and it had changed my life. We had worked together, traveled together, and created a book together in which the old man told his stories and memories and thoughts about Indian people and our American land. ~ Kent Nerburn

There's no Chanel collection without black. (It) will never exist. Who can live without some black clothes. ~ Karl Lagerfeld

There's another story I know. This one doesn't have any swords or visions. This one is about a boy who found a girl during a terrible time."
"How did it turn out?"
"I don't know, but I do know the boy doesn't regret it. Not a minute. No matter how it turns out. Because he's been waiting for this girl from the time she was born, and if it takes another thousand years to meet her again, he'd wait again. Whatever it takes. ~ Priya Ardis

am a boy with replete of dreams, aspiring to achieve a few and working to pursue a little ~ Rexa

I was just passing buy some racks of socks and remembered I needed some. So I picked 'em up. 1 black, 2 grey and 3 white pairs. ~ Lucas Grabeel

Poisonous jealousy thrummed through my veins. ~ Holly Black

He was the All-American Boy. Handsome, polite, top student, great athlete, buddy, boyfriend, son, soon-to-be frat brother. Schooner kept everyone happy.
Schooner Moore had no fucking idea who he really was. ~ Julie A. Richman

Do you see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?"
"I hope there's gray ... Black and white make things easier, but only if you don't want to think. ~ Harry Turtledove

Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best." "The best and the worst." So one of us is like to live in song. "And a few who were a bit of both. Like him." He tapped the page he had been reading. "Who?" Ser Loras craned his head around to see. "Ten black pellets on a scarlet field. I do not know those arms." "They belonged to Criston Cole, who served the first Viserys and the second Aegon." Jaime closed the White Book. "They called him Kingmaker. ~ George R R Martin

Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine year old off Twitter on the second date is not 'rather like in Jane Austen's day'. (Talitha) ~ Helen Fielding

Nobody loves the head of a dandelion. Maybe because they are so many, strong, and soon. ~ Toni Morrison

You are the Daughter of Death," hissed Aru. "You don't walk into a telephone pole because of a boy. ~ Roshani Chokshi

Black people still call me Prince. Sometimes I ask them, "Why do you call me Prince?" And people say, "Because you are a prince to us." Usually when they say that, you know my heart goes out and I have to say, "I don't mind your calling me that." ~ Prince