Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It hasn't been for a lack of trying. But we really have to analyze in a deeper way why we have these problems - at least at the state level - electing an African-American.
Unfortunately, in television today there are very few African-American characters who are human beings. They are typically two-dimensional stereotypes, cookie-cutter types.
In African-American culture, there's often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has.
Too many people have lost their lives, particularly in the African-American community, for the right to vote. I stand in their shadows and I am standing on their shoulders.
You gotta understand, my great-grandfather was German and Irish. My grandmother was Indian, and my grandfather was African-American, so we all got a little something in us.
You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.
I think that we, as the African-American men in hip-hop, we have a greater responsibly because we have the ears of so many millions of our young people. And they listenin'.
I don't think we're getting the empathy, and identifying with the situations that many African Americans experience. That's the problem with how the story is being reported.
I always believed there would be an African-American president. It was something I'd dreamed about, thought about, but certainly did not believe would happen in my lifetime.
We have to build that African-American offensive coordinator/quarterback coach that is going to be a head coach. I think that's our job as head coaches - to find those guys.
Bernie Sanders would say, "You still have millions of African Americans who aren't insured, and if we had a single-payer system, that wouldn't be the case." And that's true.
We are carrying collectively a lot of trauma, especially those of us in the African-American community. And if we're not careful, it'll overtake us, and we'll self-destruct.
If you think back , the Academy was doing a better job. Think about how many more African Americans were nominated.We need to get better at this. We used to be better at it.
I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African American.
Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.
Somehow, someway, for some people there's an automatic assumption that a mayor who is African-American or some other elected official has to support another African-American.
I really truly respect and honor the fact that the majority of my district is African-American and that I have to make sure that I surround myself with people with that lens.
The average late-night viewer is in their mid-50s and the average viewer of TBS is in their 30s and is largely African-American and Hispanic, already, before I even get there.
Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.
If we have the courage and tenacity of our forebears, who stood firmly like a rock against the lash of slavery, we shall find a way to do for our day what they did for theirs.
Culture is about humanizing people. You look at the African-American civil rights movement, you look at the LGBT rights movement - the culture changed before the politics did.
We can go on talking about racism and who treated whom badly, but what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wallow in that or are you going to create your own agenda?
Her continuity - you know, if you connect Harriet Tubman, who died in 1913, to Rosa Parks, born in 1913, you get this extraordinary spectrum of the African-American experience.
The only reason I've been so critical of hip-hop is because I've always been aware of the effect that it has, and the reflection that it gives of the African-American community.
We must protect the civil rights of American citizens - African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and all Americans - by ensuring that their jobs, wages, and well-being come first.
In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.
People know Tyler Perry, and there are standards they've come to expect from him. His brand is uplifting, and it's something a lot of inner-city African-Americans can relate to.
We can see that the complexity we witness inside the African-American community today has always been there. Black people were just as noble and just as ignoble as anybody else.
Precisely that, covering 500 years of African-American history in six hours. I've been working on this for seven years. The biggest challenge was deciding which stories to tell.
The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.
Antoine 'Fats' Domino was a 1950s rock n' roll pioneer, a larger-than-life New Orleans figure, and a role model for the African-American community in a time of deep segregation.
In L.A., I was a talent manager for many years. I represented many African-American actors. After a while, I became disheartened over the shortage of roles for African Americans.
The thing to do is to get organized; keep separated and you will be exploited, you will be robbed, you will be killed. Get organized and you will compel the world to respect you.
My intention is not to repudiate an African American identity but perhaps to resist how labels take hold, or to make it as slow a process as possible. That's more my sense of it.
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
The most important thing is to be happy and true to yourself. I don't want to look back at this in 30 years from now and say, 'I did it all to make them happy and I didn't enjoy.'
I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.
I've got nothing against any individual American, except that there aren't any. They're always Irish-American, African-American... There's never an American-American you can blame.
The writer in me can look as far as an African-American woman and stop. Often that writer looks through the African-American woman. Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.
I think you had the GOP down there in North Carolina reaching out to African-American voters and this guy coming on television and using the N-word and saying what Don Yelton said.
If somebody comes up and they're African American as Mike is, and they're extremely talented as Mike is, they say, "Oh, yeah, he's the next ..." I think that it points to disparity.
Black painters have done all kinds of work. It's the treatment of forms they engage in-that's what determines the value of the work, not whether you call them a black artist or not.
The African-American community has been let down by our politicians. They talk good around election time, and after the election, they say, see ya later, I'll see you in four years.
These same people who accuse Planned Parenthood of 'targeting' African-American children, they care about you only while you're in the womb. The minute you crown, you're on your own.
When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.
Getting into the banjo and discovering that it was an African-American instrument, it totally turned on its head my idea of American music - and then, through that, American history.
I think, though, as African-American women, we are always trained to value our community even at the expense of ourselves, and so we attempt to protect the African-American community.
People who are overweight face discrimination. African-Americans face discrimination. Women face discrimination and sexism. So I don't have the luxury of not being tolerant of anyone.
Currently, more than 4.7 million African Americans receive Social Security benefits, and nearly 8 million people with disabilities depend on Social Security for their daily sustenance.
Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvelously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne.