Black Nationalism Quotes

Any ministry to black people which is not designed to effect their empowerment is designed to perpetuate their enslavement. ~ Albert B. Cleage Jr.

When Pope Pius XII died, LIFE magazine carried a picture of him in his private study kneeling before a black Christ. What was the source of their information? All white people who have studied history and geography know that Christ was a black man. Only the poor, brainwashed American Negro has been made to believe that Christ was white, to maneuver him into worshiping the white man. After becoming a Muslim in prison, I read almost everything I could put my hands on in the prison library. I began to think back on everything I had read and especially with the histories, I realized that nearly all of them read by the general public have been made into white histories. I found out that the history-whitening process either had left out great things that black men had done, or some of the great black men had gotten whitened. ~ Malcolm X

The political philosophy of black nationalism means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community; no more. ~ Malcolm X

[Black nationalism] is not designed to make the black man reevaluate the white man
you know him already
but to make the black man re-evaluate himself. Don't change the white man's mind; you can't change his mind. And that whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America
America's conscience is bankrupt. ~ Malcolm X

The world since Adam has been white - and corrupt. The world of tomorrow will be black - and righteous. In the white world there has been nothing but slavery, suffering, death and colonialism. In the black world of tomorrow, there will be true freedom, justice and equality for all. And that day is coming - sooner than you think. ~ Malcolm X

Black America "isn't just as fissured as white America; it is more so," wrote Gates. And the mounting intraracial disparities mean that the realities of race no longer affect all blacks in the same way. There have been perverse consequences: in part to assuage our sense of survivor's guilt, we often cloak these differences in a romantic black nationalism - something that has become the veritable socialism of the black bourgeoisie.32 ~ Jason L. Riley

In America, the materio-economic conditions relate to a societal, multi-group existence in a way never before know in world history. American Negro nationalism can never create its own values, find its revolutionary significance, define its political and economic goals, until Negro intellectuals take up the cudgels against the cultural imperialism practiced in all of its manifold ramifications on the Negro within American culture. But this kind of revolution would have to be predicated on the recognition that the cultural and artistic originality of the American nation is founded, historically, on the ingredients of a black aesthetic and artistic base. ~ Harold Cruse

Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American. ~ Malcolm X

If [black] nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence. ~ Barack Obama

These negroes aren't asking for no nation. They wanna crawl back on the plantation. ~ Malcolm X

Feminism is to sexism what black nationalism is to racism; the most rational response to the problem. ~ Pearl Cleage

The economic philosophy of black nationalism only means that our people need to be re-educated into the importance of controlling the economy of the community in which we live, which means that we won't have to constantly be involved in picketing and boycotting other people in other communities in order to get jobs. ~ Malcolm X

J.W. and Roy didn't just snatch the childhood away from Emmett; they stole it from every single black child in Mississippi. ~ Bernice L. McFadden

Shaking my head, I watched the cat run under the van and stare at us with black
eyes. I wasn't a cat person. They always seemed like they were secretly plotting
the destruction of the human race. And despite the cutesy name Zoe had given it,
this one struck me as slightly evil. ~ Erin Lynn

Across the San Joaquin valley, across California, across the entire nation, wherever there are injustices against men and women and children who work in the fields - there you will see our flags - with the black eagle with the white and red background, flying. Our movement is spreading like flames across a dry plain. ~ Cesar Chavez

Bloody stars, if this was what it was going to be like having both halves of herself merged into one, she wasn't so certain she wanted to do it. Before evrething was morally black or white, and now if was becoming alarmingly gray. ~ Kady Cross

I haven't done a great deal of it but this was a chance to do more and bring it to that part of the business and even more so, but the fact that it was a black superhero was really the catalyst to me. ~ Blair Underwood

If no other consideration had convinced me of the value of the Christian life, the Christ like work which the Church of all denominations in America has done during the last 35 years for the elevation of the black man would have made me a Christian. ~ Booker T. Washington

The most insidious of our country, the greediest and highest rung of our socioeconomic ladder, line their pockets with misappropriated funds as military personnel and hordes of civilians are maimed or killed. It's not their children out there, blinded by manufactured patriotism or lured into the service with the promise of economic stability, all with the sanctimonious blessings of misguided public consent by way of corporate, state-sponsored media. It won't be their children who are terrorized by Wahabbist insurgents tearing through city blocks and rural areas as only an ever-devouring plague could. It won't be any of their loved ones watching thousands of years of civilization unraveling like an old sweater as each thread of wool is lit on fire or stolen to sell on the black market for greedy consumers with a fetish for hijacked Mesopotamian artifacts. ~ M.B. Dallocchio

The interesting thing about Georgia is, Atlanta is teeming with middle-class black people and black people with money - and yet there is still segregation. ~ Richard Benjamin

Chorus:
'man after man after man
o mortal generations
here once
almost not here
what are we
dust ghosts images a rustling of air
nothing nothing
we breathe on the abyss
we are the abyss
our happiness no more than traces of a dream
the high noon sun sinking into the sea
the red spume of its wake raining behind it
we are you
we are you Oedipus
dragging your maimed foot
in agony
and now that I see your life finally revealed
your life fused with the god
blazing out of the black nothingness of all we know
I say
no happiness lasts nothing human lasts ~ Sophocles

Europe was not born in the early Middle Ages. No common identity in 1000 linked Spain to Russia, Ireland to the Byzantine empire (in what is now the Balkans, Greece and Turkey), except the very weak sense of community that linked Christian polities together. There was no common European culture, and certainly not any Europe-wide economy. There was no sign whatsoever that Europe would, in a still rather distant future, develop economically and militarily, so as to be able to dominate the world. Anyone in 1000 looking for future industrialization would have put bets on the economy of Egypt, not of the Rhineland and Low Countries, and that of Lancashire would have seemed like a joke. In politico-military terms, the far south-east and south-west of Europe, Byzantium and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), provided the dominant states of the Continent, whereas in western Europe the Carolingian experiment (see below, Chapters 16 and 17) had ended with the break-up of Francia (modern France, Belgium and western Germany), the hegemonic polity for the previous four hundred years. The most coherent western state in 1000, southern England, was tiny. In fact, weak political systems dominated most of the Continent at the end of our period, and the active and aggressive political systems of later on in the Middle Ages were hardly visible.

National identities, too, were not widely prominent in 1000, even if one rejects the association between nationalism and modernity made in much contemp ~ Chris Wickham

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again. ~ James Baldwin

One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it
it was the black kitten's fault entirely. ~ Lewis Carroll

We got no wealthy black people. We got rich people. Shaq is rich. The guy who signs his checks is wealthy. ~ Chris Rock

I still can't quite grasp what you are telling me. I find it impossible to believe that there would be such unreasoning feeling against harmless people."
Amaryl said bitterly, "That's because you've never had any occasion to interest yourself in such things. It can all pass right under your nose and you wouldn't smell a thing because it doesn't affect you."
Dors said, "Mr. Amaryl, Dr. Seldon is a mathematician like you and his head can sometimes be in the clouds. You must understand that. I am a historian, however. I know that it isn't unusual to have one group of people look down upon another group. There are peculiar and almost ritualistic hatreds that have no rational justification and that can have their serious historical influence. It's too bad."
Saying something is 'too bad' is easy. You say you disapprove, which makes you a nice person, and then you can go about your own business and not be interested anymore. It's a lot worse than 'too bad.' It's against everything decent and natural. We're all of us the same, yellow-hairs and black-hairs, tall and short, Easterners, Westerners, Southerners, and Outworlders. We're all of us, you and I and even the Emperor, descended from the people of Earth, aren't we? ~ Isaac Asimov

I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept. I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked. ~ Lena Horne

I got hit on at the bar last night, and this morning I have a black eye. Sometimes you can be so sexy that you offend, I guess. ~ Jarod Kintz

Politics and nationalism often play far greater roles than conservation in the decision-making process. ~ Mark Kurlansky

Only in the first hour of the night can I become human, while the male dove is busy with the twelve dead.'
Black Book 2 ~ C. G. Jung

Little mouse," a voice said through the keyhole. "Don't you know the more you wriggle, the greater the cat's delight? ~ Holly Black

As anger is a passing storm, so it comes not gradually and with signs, but like a sudden sweep of wind or black squall. ~ James Vila Blake

When I get 13 or 14 years old, I get crazy with rock music, like, like, deeply crazy. And one of my favorite bands at that moment was, for example, like - bands like Metallica or Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and Santana, you know? And then I start to play metal, actually, when I was - at the age of 15. ~ Juanes

When this is over, let's just do it."
"Do what?" Lila gazes up at him. Adjusts his thick black frames as they slip down his nose.
"Get married."
She smiles. "Married, huh. Are you proposing?"
"Not officially. After, when this job is done, I am going to go buy you the biggest ring I can afford - which won't be very big at all, but I will buy it with love. Then I will get down on one knee and that's when I will propose."
"I might say yes."
"God willing. ~ Cheryl McIntyre

You have to use what you have in order to get what you need and the people can not be rich unless somebody is rich. The Hip-Hop generation has carried more people with it than any other enterprise Black Americans have had. ~ Nikki Giovanni

Clever lies become matters of self-congratulation. Solemn pledges become a farce - laughable for their very solemnity. The Nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the churches, and the literary mock thunders of its patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact that the Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation, that all its precautions are against it, and any new birth of its fellow in the world is always followed in its mind by the dread of a new peril. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death! ~ Dylan Thomas

He was away in a mystery, locked in the enigma that young Southern Black boys start to unravel, start to try to unravel, from seven years old to death. The humorless puzzle of inequality and hate. ~ Maya Angelou

All who hear are called. All who are called are able. ~ Chuck Black

At the end of the parapet, a long black coat lay neatly folded on the wall. At the other end stood my sister and her lover. Tati's arms were wound around Sorrow's neck, her body pressed close to his, as if she would melt into him. His hands were enlaced in my sister's long hair as he strained her slight form against him, white on black. Their eyes were closed; their lips clung; they were lost in each other. It was beautiful and powerful. It was impossible. ~ Juliet Marillier

What ignited the rocket that sent you up into the vast regions of comedy, and why? I would say, for me, that philosophical treatise about having black beginnings and wanting love to compensate for that, wanting audiences and wanting attention - I say, "Au contraire." Completely opposite. I want the continuation of my mother's incredible love and attention to me. ~ Mel Brooks

[Willis is] asking to be treated like an American. A real American. Because, honestly, when you think American, what color do you see? White? Black? We've been here two hundred years. Why doesn't this face register as American? ~ Charles Yu