Cornel West Quotes

Think about how much fashion profits from black culture and how underrepresented we are in the industry. If you insist on using black celebrities to peddle your merchandise and add a cool factor to your front row, it is indecent to not care about the plights of that person's community.

The Government is responsible for what is happening to black people in America.

Sometimes black people really want to hold onto our oppression - 'This is ours! This belongs to us.' You can't just talk about equality for somebody else. Let's pass it on. Let's pass it on to somebody else. At the end of the day, it is all about inequality.

When I think of the trials and tribulations that black men go through in America and that black artists went through, I feel very privileged.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

Blacks essentially play the race card, when necessary as a counter to white privilege.

Black Lives Matter was born out of our unwavering love for black people and our undeniable rage over a system that has historically dehumanized black people.

Black artists deserve the opportunity to create work without the burden of alleviating the social ills plaguing many black communities.

And I feel like, as a black man within black culture, I know very well firsthand - as do my parents and my grandparents and great-grandparents - we're used to things not going our way.

I've said numerous times the hardest job in America isn't being a professional athlete. It's not being a matador or having some job that puts your life at risk. The hardest job in America is being black, because it's the one thing you can't outrun.

Electing the first African-American president was a tremendous accomplishment, but it hasn't erased racism.

I think the O.J. Simpson trial was a revelation about the ongoing patterns of racial difference in American society.

I think that the problem of the American negro goes beyond the principle of any organization whether it's a religious, political, or otherwise.

I can't turn around without hearing about some 'civil rights advance's White people seem to think the black man ought to be shouting 'hallelujah's Four hundred years the white man has had his foot-long knife in the black man's back — and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches! The black man's supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it's still going to leave a scar!

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.

Black culture is cool, but black issues sure aren't, huh?

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

When you talk about "white privilege", you're talking about something systemic. When you're talking about "black privilege" it's something spiritual because we as black people tap into a divine system that a lot of other cultures and races can't tap into and that system allows us to prosper in spite of everything that's been thrown our way from slavery to segregation to mass incarceration. We have a privilege pre-ordained by God that nothing and no one can stop.

I don't believe for a minute anybody allowed people to suffer because they are African Americans.

Black people in America have come from slavery to other forms of being oppressed and there are some things that come with that - some pain and anger that come with that and we as black people have to deal with it to heal that. White people have to understand it and have some compassion toward it.

While it has become “cool” for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.

The burden of being black is that you have to be superior just to be equal. But the glory of it is that, once you achieve, you have achieved, indeed.

For those who say that the war on drugs and the system of mass incarceration really isn't about race, I say there is no way we would allow the majority of young white men to be swept into the criminal justice system for minor drug offenses, branded criminals and felons, and then stripped of their basis civil and human rights while young black men who are engaged in the same activity trot off to college. That would never be accepted as the norm.

I'm a grandmother and like every grandmother, I worry about the safety and security of my grandchildren, but my worries are not the same as black grandmothers.