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The greatest hope most Americans - including Republicans - had when Barack Obama was elected president was that the election of a black person as the country's president would reduce, if not come close to eliminating, the racial tensions that have plagued America for generations.
Oct 1, 2025
When you get called the n-word, as a black person you can do anything. It's like getting a gold star in Super Mario Brothers and junk. I hear the music when I hear the n-word. I get right into it; I get really into it. You can do anything. You could be in a fancy restaurant - just start throwing poop at the walls. People be like, 'What are you doing?' 'Someone called him the n-word.
Part of the popularity with Louis Farrakhan has less to do with the content of his message and more to do with the form that he portrays himself - as being a free, black person who speaks what is on his mind with boldness and fearlessness. Who is willing to pay the consequences.
I also know that I have represented for us a certain kind of journalist and for me over the years when an older Black person comes and tells me how proud they are of me and the way I represent us on television, or when a younger person says to me, 'Hey Mr. Gordon, I watched you growing up and my parents made me watch you,'.
I think, as a white person, I do not want to speak for a black person.
No black person married to a white person can speak for me!
I consider myself a human being, a Christian, a father, a husband, so many things, before being a black person.
NHPrimary Trivia: The Republican candidates have not spoken to a black person since Herman Cain dropped out.
So, to say Barack Obama is progress is saying that he's the first black person that is qualified to be president. That's not black progress. That's white progress.
A black Christian is like a black person with no memory.
They always try to make it like jocks discriminate against gay people. I've been a big proponent of gay marriage for a long time, because as a black person, I can't be in for any form of discrimination at all.
I love that as a black person I've experienced not being a minority. I think that's helped me to combat the minority mentality people can have here, which can stop them scaling the heights.
Blacks don't square dance. If you see a black person square dancing, it is definitely the seventh sign.
Speaking as a black person, welfare is the worst thing that's ever happened to us.
I don't think I'm really so unique. If every black person looked at their life they would quickly discover that they have been influenced by every type of music prevalent in America.
I don't judge people by their sexual orientation or the color of their skin, so I find it really hard to identify someone by saying that they're a gay person or a black person or a Jewish person.
So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.
When someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.
When I was in Mecca I noticed that their, they had no color problem. That they had people there whose eyes were blue and people there whose eyes were black, people whose skin was white, people whose skin was black, people whose hair was blond, people whose hair was black, from the whitest white person to the blackest black person.
When I was a teenager, black pride became newly popular again. Suddenly a lot of black people were wearing the fake kente cloth and red black and green and Bob Marley. That was sort of my window into finding my own identity as a black person.
Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.
The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn't see many paintings with black people in them.
No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
I've been in situations where I was 'black boy white,' or 'white boy black.' People didn't know, "Is he the whitest black person in the world or is he the blackest white person in the world?"
Any black person who clings to the misguided notion that white people represent the embodiment of all that is evil and black people all that is good remains wedded to the very logic of Western metaphysical dualism that is the heart of racist binary thinking. Such thinking is not liberatory. Like the racist educational ideology it mirrors and imitates, it invites a closing of the mind.
One of the big mistakes they made in Europe is that the circumstances in which you most frequently read or hear the word "race" or "racism" in Europe applies to Muslims. Which is not a race. It is a religion. You can convert to this. You cannot convert your race. I could become a Muslim. I could not become a Chinese person or a black person. So they constantly use that in Europe.
No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever again have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity for an education, a job, or simple justice.
I am a black person. I come out of an experience of exile and migration. I have always felt myself to be at once at home and away from home at the same time. It is inevitable that my perspective will be international.
I've had frank conversations with theaters who say, 'We love your play, but we've already done a play by another black person this year,' or 'I don't think the kind of people you write about are the ones our audience wants to see'... Up and coming young black female writers are still struggling to have their voices heard and have their plays produced.
There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.(Howell Raines's Pulitzer Prize winning article "Grady's Gift")-Sockett admired this quote and used it in her summary.
Certainly I feel like I'm the tip of the arrow at times because certainly the national media wants to talk about the fact that I'm a black Republican and some people think of that as zany that a black person would be a conservative but to me what is zany is any person black, white, red, brown or yellow not being a conservative.
We are blessed to grow up in a country that is the world's leader. We are blessed to be some of the most well-educated Black persons anywhere to be found in the world. This education and talent can be used in a friendly relationship with Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Asia to develop the wealth and resources of these nations. The friendship of us with our kith and kin around the world would cause both sides to benefit exponentially, based upon how well we develop these relationships.
It's time for a new National Anthem. America is divided into two definite divisions. The easy thing to cop out with is sayin' black and white. You can see a black person. But now to get down to the nitty-gritty, it's getting' to be old and young - not the age, but the way of thinking. Old and new, actually... because there's so many even older people that took half their lives to reach a certain point that little kids understand now.
I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals. Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don't fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America. Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom.
It's very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it's interpreted in some way.
The most dangerous thing in American society is a self-respecting and self-loving black person, because they're on the road to freedom and that means they're gonna run up against the powers that be.
Al Gore's Negro tolerance level has never been too high. I've never known him to have more than one black person around him at any given time.
And here come the Left Brothers - Al "747" Sharpton and Jesse "DC 10" Jackson - barreling in for a landing on top of Goodell's dome. And this time every black person with an ounce of common sense and self-respect is riding shotgun with Jesse and Al, who have justifiably voiced their displeasure with Limbaugh's ownership bid.
Black people don't hijack planes, alright? Now I'll be the first to admit, we steal a lot of stuff, but we do not hijack planes. In fact, in the history of aviation, a black person has never even attempted to hijack a plane. Do you want to know why? Because you can't sell an airplane.
As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility, which I do.
Generally, the arguments for same-sex marriage go along these lines: 'I have a civil right.' What the homosexual movement wants to do is to hitch their agenda to the civil rights movement, but I point out that this is illegitimate for a number of reasons. Number one, no black person has ever left his black-ness or changed his black-ness, but plenty of people have come out of the homosexual movement. What we need to do is distinguish between race and behavior.
The Black skin is not a badge of shame, but rather a glorious symbol of national greatness.
I would hate to say as a non-African-American person that it would be wrong for a black person to direct white people in a movie. Wouldn't that be awful of me to say that? The only sympathizing thing I might say for people that want to [grumble] is that a filmmaker should have an understanding for the place where the people you're portraying are coming from.
It's just cheaper to be White in America than it is to be Black, because of educational advances, because of the police incidents, because of the poverty we grow up in as African-Americans. So, it's just cheaper in this country if you're born a Caucasian than being born a Black person.
Does a black person make them an African American? No. There are Hispanics that are very, very dark skinned so the word has lost its meaning, it's not a very concise or proper word to use even today and it wasn't then.
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person.
What is the problem with the advertising industry is they're still, for me, what I call in Africa is the colonial mind of white men, because the black person or the other colour is out of the line. They're not good for this sort of purpose.
I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.