My personal beliefs were shaped more by experience and by watching the news when I was young: images of angelic-looking college students in Mississippi crying like the world was ending because black people were being allowed on their campus; the slow mounting horror of Vietnam on the evening news every night; sitting with my parents in front of the TV and being appalled at the way the Chicago police were treating the protesters during the '68 Democratic convention. Being eyed with suspicion because of my age and the way I wore my hair.
Seven out of 10 black faces you see on television are athletes. The black athlete carries the image of the black community. He carries the cross, in a way, until blacks make inroads in other dimensions.
There's no room for failure performing [stand-up] for a black audience. If you don't get them right away it's tough winning them back even if you're doing top-notch material. If you didn't win them right when you walked out there, it's tough.
With a black president, I can relax. . . I can dance in public. . . I can buy a whole watermelon now.
To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.
I have tried to emphasize to people that, hey, just like President Obama was a really good president, and the fact that he was black I think was historic and unprecedented, but he also claimed and owned his excellence, and that's why I'm saying, okay - I think it's really exciting and historic that I would be the first woman president, but I have a lot of work I want to do. And I hope that people will say, "Hey, she's getting it done. " That's how I think about it.
If, in [Federal Housing Administration] application, black folks were excluded from it, then you have to override that by going after those discriminatory practices.
The wheel of Time wrote the first half of the poetry of mass destruction on the black board of the ashes of a funeral ground by dint of a pair of pens of nuclear bombs.
I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.
The poor black people in it make the black people in Gone With the Wind look like Malcolm X.
Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group. They have had to understand white men, white women, and black men. And they have had to understand themselves. When black women win victories, it is a boost for virtually every segment of society.
The howl of self-interest is loud. . . but the heart is black which throbs solely to its note.
In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.
There are dozens of ways of failing to make money. It is one thing to fail to make money because your single talent happens to be a flair amounting to genius for translating the plays of Aristophanes. It is quite another thing to fail to make money because you are black, or a child, or a woman.
The Million Man March, in one day, helped to defeat all of the evil propaganda spread about Black men throughout the world.
Either because I was an athlete or because I was black - probably both - there seemed to be a clear assumption that I wouldn't be up to the work.
This is brain surgery. Ski masks on my bullets, let 'em commit brain burglary. Emergency, it's an emergency. Someone in all black left the whole scene burgundy.
A black conservative is a black who dissents from the victimization explanation of black fate.
Like everyone else, I have my quirks. For one, I have to own only black cars and the registration has to have eights. It's not something I can explain, it's just there. Another obsession I have is smell. I have to smell good all the time.
As a strong and proud and intelligent Black man I have no problem expressing my respect for and adoration of the Black woman. Simply put, I love you. I love the Black woman.