Black Culture Quotes

Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black culture while still living in the white community. You will face more hate and ridicule and ostracism than you can even begin to fathom. People are willing to accept you if they see you as an outsider trying to assimilate into their world. But when they see you as a fellow tribe member attempting to disavow the tribe, that is something they will never forgive. That is what happened to me in Eden Park. ~ Trevor Noah

There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules - I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists. ~ Kara Walker

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it. ~ Jess Row

And watching this silently, as was my way, I marveled at the bonds between us-the way we shortened our words, or spoke, sometimes, with no words at all...an entire world of our own, hidden away from them, and to be part of that world, I felt even then, was to be in on a secret, a secret that was in you. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

American music culture is black culture. ~ Yelawolf

The equilibrium you admire in me is an unstable one, difficult to maintain. My inner life was split early between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the exigencies of black-African culture and those of modern life. ~ Leopold Sedar Senghor

We've become a culture where earning money doesn't entitle you to it, but wanting it does. That is the essence of redistribution. ~ Ken Blackwell

If the KKK was smart enough, they would've created gangsta rap because it's such a caricature of black culture and black masculinity. ~ Jackson Katz

I identified with white culture, and I wanted to fit in. I didn't identify with black culture. Like, I didn't like Tyler Perry movies, and I wasn't into hip-hop music. I liked Neil Young. ~ Zoe Kravitz

"Black culture" is ready for whatever. I sense some momentum and excitement around black artists (especially in comedy, which is where most of my own art resides), really pushing the bounds of what has generally been expected as black. I don't think it's a revolution so much as an exposure of what has always been there, and now that the production and distribution means are more accessible, people can more easily find each other. ~ Baratunde Thurston

And although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it's been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior - behavior too often celebrated in black culture. ~ Jason L. Riley

When I was going to school, I just wanted to be like everybody else. I would pull at my hair to try and get it to lie straight. America was where I would consume and absorb black culture, buy Ultra Sheen and watch 'Soul Train,' but I still had that weird in-between thing. ~ Neneh Cherry

The core of the culture is racism and how black men are viewed. They've always been demonized and seen as threats in our culture. Another holdover from slavery. We've got to deal with that core root of racism and demonization of the upbringing of black men. Black women are not exempt by any means. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

Names are powerful and are prophecies of the future. The name you are called is a sign of what you are and what you would become. ~ Jude Idada

Is distinctive black culture the cause of economic disparity between whites and blacks or merely the reflection of it? ~ Steven D. Levitt

I wanted to explore black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation. ~ Alvin Ailey

I strongly believe the black culture spends too much time, energy and effort raising, praising, and teasing our black children about the dubious glories of professional sports. ~ Arthur Ashe

My daughter is black and she has to know what it is like to be black. My daughter should know you, Aiken, but she should learn what it means to be black, and you cannot teach her that. ~ Allan Dare Pearce

Fear, after all, is our real enemy. Fear is taking over our world. Fear is being used as a tool of manipulation in our society. Itʼs how politicians peddle policy and how Madison Avenue sells us things that we donʼt need. Think about it. Fear that weʼre going to be attacked, fear that there are communists lurking around every corner, fear that some little Caribbean country that doesnʼt believe in our way of life poses a threat to us. Fear that black culture may take over the world. Fear of Elvis Presleyʼs hips. Well, maybe that one is a real fear. Fear that our bad breath might ruin our friendships… Fear of growing old and being alone. ~ Christopher Isherwood

1. Close Friend, someone who got yo back, yo "main nigga."
2. Rooted in blackness and the Black experience. From a middle-aged social worker: "That Brotha ain like dem ol e-lights, he real, he a shonuff nigga"
3. Generic, neutral refrence to African Americans. From a 30 something college educated Sista: "The party was live, it was wall to wall niggaz there"
4. A sista's man/lover/partner. from the beauty shop. "Guess we ain gon be seein too much of girlfriend no mo since she got herself a new nigga" From Hip Hop artist Foxy brown, "Ain no nigga like the on I got."
5. Rebellious, fearless unconventional, in-yo-face Black man. From former NBA superstar Charles Barkley, "Nineties niggas... The DailyNews, The Inquirer has been on my back... They want their Black Athletes to be Uncle Tom. I told you white boys you've never heard of a 90s nigga. We do what we want to do" quoted in The Source, December 1992).
6. Vulgar, disrespectful Black Person, antisocial, conforming to negative sterotype of African Americans. From former Hip Hop group Arrested Development, in their best-selling song, "People Everyday" 1992: A black man actin like a nigga... got stomped by an African"
7. A cool, down person, rooted in Hip Hop and black culture, regardless of race, used today by non-blacks to refer to other non-Blacks.
8. Anyone engaged in inappropriate, negative behavior; in this sense, Blacks may even apply the term to White folk. According to African Ame ~ H. Samy Alim

I wish BET did more to represent the full spectrum of black experiences in a balanced manner. If you watch BET, you get the sense that the only way black people succeed is through professional sports, music, or marrying/fucking/being a baby mama of someone who is involved with professional sports or music. ~ Roxane Gay

I think rap music is the sole reason for a lot of black acceptance in pop culture; because the music is very popular, it gets our image out in other ways than in movies. ~ Ice Cube

African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures. ~ Malcolm-Jamal Warner

While it has become "cool" for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism. ~ Bell Hooks

It taught me that it is easier to be an insider as an outsider than to be an outsider as an insider. If a white guy chooses to immerse himself in hip-hop culture and only hang out with black people, black people will say, "Cool, white guy. Do what you need to do." If a black guy chooses to button up his blackness to live among white people and play lots of golf, white people will say, "Fine. I like Brian. He's safe." But try being a black person who immerses himself in white culture while still living in the black community. Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black culture while still living in the white community. ~ Trevor Noah

Teenagers especially are very, very conscious about what is hip and what is lame and what is square and what is out and what is in, you know. And, I mean, I grew up right there in the middle of a black culture. And I knew dead-on what it was. ~ Jerry Leiber

I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures. ~ Terence McKenna

There's a thing called the 'One Drop' theory in African-American culture, which is if you have one drop of black blood in you, you're black. ~ Keegan-Michael Key

I've always said as a political scientist that "culture" is what we use when we can't explain things. I think it's more about accessibility. Part of the problem is that this is an expensive game [golf]. I know in a couple of places where there are black members, and they come from pretty much the same socioeconomic level that the white members come from. ~ Condoleezza Rice

Black folks are often individually regarded as the authority on every facet of black culture and the people who create it, but it's exhausting for most black people to constantly be relied upon as the go-to official spokesnegro. ~ Justin Simien

Phillip Roth uses his Black women characters to make anti intellectual remarks about Black history month, begun by a man who reached intellectual heights that Roth will never attain.Roth is a petty bigot and his ignorant remarks about black culture expose him as a buffoon to scholars the world over. ~ Ishmael Reed

Black culture has contributed hugely to American society: The civil rights movement brought meaning to American notions of equality and freedom; black contributions to politics, science, music, and art have helped enrich all of us. To demean these accomplishments and contributions by listing rap among them is to demean black culture as a whole. ~ Ben Shapiro

I think slavery was an awful, awful period in our history, but when I look at what's become of black culture since emancipation, I think you have to admit, maybe the Confederacy was on to something ~ Zach Braff

As a child, I experienced black culture as many people did in America: on the TV, radio, and stages. ~ Shawn Amos

In advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and the creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, Right, or Center, or whether they are peaceful, reform, violent, non-violent or laissez-faire. Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines. ~ Harold Cruse

I was in Paris last year, where there's a great appreciation of many different aspects of African culture and of black culture. The music ... the art ... whatever ... And I kind of went with that. ~ Lenny Kravitz

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won t. ~ William Faulkner

The black nation of Egypt is the only country that has a science named after its culture: Egyptology ~ Malcolm X

I majored in directing. However, I did spend some time at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, so I am somewhat well-versed in African Studies. ~ Chadwick Boseman

What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we loved black culture? ~ Amandla Stenberg

I've always loved black culture; I don't know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. ~ Robert Greene

Black is not a notion. Africa is not a color. Africa is a culture. So you can be pitch black and I am my color but I'm more African than you can ever be because culturally there are certain things that you just don't understand. ~ Jihan El-Tahri

We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition. ~ Christopher Lasch

I was wrong, you were right. I'm dumb, you're smart. I'm ugly, and you're a stone-cold fox. ~ Toooldforthis

I love how Scarlett Avery has a way of making the stories come to life. - P brad ~ Scarlett Avery

White folks, no matter how well-meaning or open-minded, have no true idea what it's like to be black in America. That's not a slam against white people or an accusation of latent bigotry. But the fact is that we all live in an Anglo-dominated society. ~ John Ridley

I realized with Broadway everything written for black people is usually written in the past, and I'm kind of a contemporary guy. I don't think you want to see me in 'Raisin in the Sun'. ~ Chris Rock

Equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture ... have simply made us all members of one class. ~ Edward Bellamy

What about you, how are you going to set about finding your alpha mate?"

"He'll find me."

"I don't think alpha men just happen along these days, Dee-Dee. You ave to look for them in the right places."

"If by right places you mean fetish clubs then I'm not interested...I don't want some bonehead with a boner and a whip. I want a natural dominant...who knows when to draw the line, and who knows how to take care of me in every sense. ~ Fabian Black

It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture. ~ Hans Hofmann

It wasn't the type of CIA job you'd find an application for on Jobs/CIA.Gov. It was a deep black-ops organization that hadn't been to a Senate Committee meeting since the Reagan Administration, and even then it was falsely presented as a training program. ~ Jennifer Arnett

It's too late to leave the future to the futurists. ~ Sherry Turkle

In Soviet times, the border was closed, so we couldn't get out of the country, and I had been reading Robinson Crusoe. I wanted to see the ocean, I wanted to see boats, I wanted to see black people, because we didn't have that in the Soviet Union. I was all excited by that stuff. ~ Wladimir Klitschko

Thus wuwei manifests itself in the adaptive integration of the interacting parts of units of a complex system. The tendency of wuwei is to lead a system toward a state of fractal congruence, a close fitting together, a coalescing, of its significant components. The cooperation of those components facilitates the functioning of the system on its new holistic level. At the highest levels of complexity, wuwei integrates human beings into the systems of the world. This process of integration represents a synergistic enhancement of Dao by empathic human participants in cooperation with nature and with the outgrowths of human nature that have emerged from our evolutionary history and constitute culture. Thus, a fractal self is such a human being who is a participant with others, open to various worlds within nature and culture, and this person becomes a potential facilitator of emergence. ~ David Jones

So then, it's fair to say that you were thinking about me all week?" Now it was my turn to look shaken. Damn. Just when I had him.
"No ... and ... . no, I will not go out with
you." I leaned back in my chair and decided to look at the score board. Maybe, if I ignored him, he would leave. The Black Eyed Peas were playing loudly over the speakers. I tapped my foot to the rhythm.
"Why not?" He seemed agitated. I liked it.
"Because I am a llama and you are a bird and WE are not compatible. ~ Tarryn Fisher

She was her father's daughter but she'd inherited her mother's black anger. It burned through her sometimes like a chemical fire, brief and devastating and utterly unstoppable. ~ Amber Sparks

But my happiness is a squishy kind of happiness, squeezing itself in where it can fit, pushing around all the sadness and the stress and the pressure, finding any empty spot, any crevice, and filling it. Don't mind me, it says. I won't bother anyone. I know this is a room for sadness, but I just need a little corner. I try to kick it out, because it isn't welcome here, it didn't even come wearing black, but it won't go. It's a stubborn guest. One that I secretly want to stay. ~ Katherine Webber

The relentless pressures of the so-called marketplace have distorted all our culture industries. ~ Mark Crispin Miller

The cultures we can look at had already grasped the essential unity of nature. No board of gods can survive that knowledge. ~ Jack McDevitt

Why do women love to read about sexually aggressive billionaire bad boy alpha males but condemn the same behavior in real life? ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

but racism is about the power of a group and in America it's white folks who have that power. How? Well, white folks don't get treated like shit in upper-class African-American communities and white folks don't get denied bank loans or mortgages precisely because they are white and black juries don't give white criminals worse sentences than black criminals for the same crime and black police officers don't stop white folk for driving while white and black companies don't choose not to hire somebody because their name sounds white and black teachers don't tell white kids that they're not smart enough to be doctors and black politicians don't try some tricks to reduce the voting power of white folks through gerrymandering and advertising agencies don't say they can't use white models to advertise glamorous products because they are not considered "aspirational" by the "mainstream." So ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand. ~ Samuel Butler

There's no such thing as a limit on being the best. You can always go for more. That's what it means to be human. No... That's what it means to be me. - Claire Stanfield ~ Ryohgo Narita

Pakistan is an Islamic country and the victim of an Easter terrorist attack. Groups like Isis or in this case the Taliban are not about religion. No more than the KKK is about Christianity. These groups are about hate! I did post on the Pakistani attack because it is really important to point out that brown and black people in the middle east and Africa are being killed. Terrorism isn't about Islam. It is about hate. SO let's fight this hate. Let's stand united with our Islamic brothers and sisters who are being slaughtered. Step back from judging a religion you are not exposed to. Understand that we need to work together. ALL faiths. That's how we defeat this ~ Johnny Corn

The last decade has seen a powerful counterassault on women's rights, a backlash, an attempt to retract the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women. This counterassault is largely insidious: in a kind of pop-culture version of the Big Lie, it stands the truth boldly on its head and proclaims that the very steps that have elevated women's position have actually led to their downfall. ~ Susan Faludi

Everything's better when you say it in Latin. ~ Holly Black

The time frame and how people treated each other was upsetting, but what's great about this story is that they really focus on the strengths of these people and the strengths of the culture, of who these Americans were. That, actually, is uplifting. ~ Aldis Hodge

The great tragedy is that they're removing art completely, not because they're putting more science in, but because they can't afford the art teachers or because somebody thinks it's not useful. An enlightened society has all of this going on within it. It's part of what distinguishes what it is to be human from other life forms on Earth - that we have culture ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

In an organizational culture where respect and the dignity of individuals are held as the highest values, shame and blame don't work as management styles. There is no leading by fear. Empathy is a valued asset, accountability is an expectation rather than an exception, and the primal human need for belonging is not used as leverage and social control. We can't control the behavior of individuals; however, we can cultivate organizational cultures where behaviors are not tolerated and people are held accountable for protecting what matters most: human beings. We ~ Brene Brown

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia. ~ Basil Bunting

Seeing a Kingdom culture established on earth is the dream of God, and it must become the dream of His people. ~ Bill Johnson

We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as "it" is but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture. ~ Neil Postman

Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in. ~ Maureen Corrigan

It was a sweet view-sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive. ~ Jane Austen

You know, one of the things I like about this world, or at least I like about the way we're presenting this world, is these issues are terribly complicated - not nearly as black and white as we're led to believe. ~ Aaron Sorkin

Once Monica appeared wearing a borderline unprofessional dress, a bit too short, if you asked me. I could only think, Who does she think she is? She was straphanging around George Stephanopoulos, and I shooed her like a stray cat. She hissed another lame excuse. I was fed up with her games, but at this moment the president arrived, easily catching her sight (or scent - I don't know which). They made small talk. She walked away. Her mission was complete; she had caught the president's wandering eye. She turned back to ensure she had his attention - and flipped up her black-and-white print dress to reveal her blue thong. ~ Gary J. Byrne