Angela Davis Quotes

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.

I felt black. I was as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons. They were better musicians, they were better athletes, they were not uptight about sex, and they knew how to enjoy life better than most people.

What is blackness? Is it the way you talk? Do you got to say, 'Dey this, dey dat.' Or the way you dress? Or is it the forgiving of certain things? What is black enough?

The Negro and all things negroid had become a fad, and Harlem had become a shrine to which feverish pilgrimages were in order . . . Seventh Avenue was the gorge into which Harlem cliff dwellers crowded to promenade.

If you think about black art, all black art, whether it's Invisible Man or whether it's James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Hurston, or Richard Wright, they all deal with elements of identity and trying to humanize our experience and our struggle in the world where people have been indifferent to who we are and what we are. It's basically just saying that our lives have meaning.

Hip-Hop isn't just music, it is also a spiritual movement of the blacks! You can't just call Hip-Hop a trend!

I don't mind being black. I'm black out loud. It's more than the people that they are, it's the condition that they represent.

Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.

It would seem that some black people want to say that when you, as a black, become successful, you cease to be black. That's ridiculous.

I used to joke for years that I was a black man. I adopted the black culture, the black race. I married a black woman, and I had black kids. I always considered myself a 'brother.'

Hip-hop has globalized a conception of blackness that has had a political impact, whether or not it had a political intent.

I'm an African American.

I'm black because that's the way the world sees me.

I viewed black musicals before 'Jelly' as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.

Our Luke Cage is a black hero, not a hero who happens to be black.

I'm a black man in the United States, and there's no two ways about that. I have a shared common experience with other black men, and through that, there's an automatic understanding.

We're not monolithic. What is blackness? To me, how do you define that?

All black art is always judged to illuminate our experience and prove that our stories and our history and our lives matter. And that goes back to Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston - take your pick.

I love being black.

With my face paint on, I don't look like a regular black dude.

The way black people feel, especially, is if you're going to tell a black story, let it come from a real place.

I'm not going to be one of those people who says, 'I'm a showrunner; I'm not a black showrunner.' I'm black when I go to sleep. I'm black when I wake up, period. It doesn't affect my perspective on everything, but at the same time, it's who I am, and I'm proud of it.

As a black person, I'm used to going to places in which I might be the only black person that shows up there. This experience has an effect on the way you see yourself in the world and what it means to be black in the world.

Hip-hop isn't dead by any means, but it's not something I define my black identity with.

I tried to do Kwanzaa with my family and was like, 'This sucks. What am I doing this for?' For me, I felt like I was doing it because I was trying to live up to someone else's idea of what 'black' was.