No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.
I have been guilty of watching Westerns without acknowledging that Native Americans have gone through the same madness as African Americans. Isn't it extraordinary that sometimes the most offended have not seen others being offended?
During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.
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.
When you graduate is when you start to find yourself looking at the information in the audition breakdown and it says tall black African - or African-American built such and such. And you start seeing these character descriptions and seeing that, oh, you're only going in for the ones that are described as your look.
There must always be a remedy for wrong and injustice if we only know how to find it.
The fact that there aren't an abundance of African-American males that are getting lead roles [and] that are getting roles that have prominence on the big screen. [It's] the same thing from behind the camera; maybe even worse. Coming up, when you're black and you want to direct somebody says, "Oh, you're Spike Lee" or "You're John Singleton. "
Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.
I am convinced that the Black man will only reach his full potential when he learns to draw upon the strengths and insights of the Black woman.
Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.
I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon's lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor.
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
In 2008, the Democrats made a great effort among African-American voters, and they did increase their turnout considerably, and among Latino voters.
If [Hillary] Clinton can't boost African-American turnout, even with all that help, the question becomes whether she can make up for it with historic levels of support from Hispanics and suburban women.
I think anyone that comes to Nigeria has to offer value. What value are you bringing? There are Black Americans here. I think we've moved beyond that Africans vs. African Americans. They may have more issues with us than we do with them.
African-American women who develop breast cancer are more likely to die from the disease than White women of the same age. Survival rates are worse among African-Americans for colon, prostate and ovarian cancers as well.
I have written a song that says: If you ever lose someone dear to you, never say the words, "They're gone," and they'll come back.
Remember that everyone's life is measured by the power that individual has to make the world better-this is all life is.
In 2012, African-Americans were 13 percent of the electorate, and 93 percent of them voted for [Barack] Obama.
I think the important thing to understand first and foremost about Michael Jackson is that he was the international emblem of the African American blues spiritual impulse that goes back through slavery - Jim Crow, Jane Crow, up to the present moment, through a Louis Armstrong, through a Ma Rainey, through a Bessie Smith, all the way to John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone.