Steven Biko Quotes

I'm not just a black man, I'm a brotha. I love my people. When I'm on the air I am fully aware that I am not just representing myself but representing us.

What frustrates me is to see African-Americans behave as though what European-Americans say is worthwhile. It simply isn't. It's just some silly people who can make laws and have the power to enforce them. I'm often amazed at the conversations black people have about themselves. They ought to be having these conversations about white people. It's white people who are flawed and at fault.

What Black Consciousness seeks to do is to produce real black people who do not regard themselves as appendages to white society. We do not need to apologise for this because it is true that the white systems have produced through the world a number of people who are not aware that they too are people.

When you want a nation, that's called nationalism... Black nationalism. A revolutionary is a Black nationalist. He wants a nation.

Every colonized people-in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality-finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.

We must realise that prophetic cry of black students: Black man you are on your own!

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.

White domination is so complete that even American Indian children want to be cowboys. It's as if Jewish children wanted to play Nazis.

You cannot turn the clock back, you cannot give the island of Manhattan back to the indigenous, but on the other hand, you can ensure that the indigenous can maintain their way of life.

The thing that is being lost is heritage. In Africa, religion and advertisement and television and media hype have gotten Africans to where they are convinced psychologically that their own heritage is heathen, pagan, barbaric, savage, primitive.

You know, one of the ways we adapted to not being free was to think that our group identity was again, the way we were being black, and being down with the cards. That was the way we were going to get it. Unity was everything.

When I read Malcolm X, I didn't agree with it all, but I inhaled it; I connected to his rage.

For generations, black children have been brought up to have a critical race consciousness, a framework for dealing with prejudice and discrimination, which helps inoculate them against the spiritual toxins they will almost certainly encounter as they come of age in our society.

I'm not anti-anything. I'm not anti-Jew or Gentile, I'm not anti-white, but I am pro-black. I am pro my people. And I love us so much that it gets on my nerves when we do stupid things.

The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.

If people lose their land, they have nothing. You lose your land - you lose your culture, you lose self.

Black Consciousness therefore takes cognizance of the deliberateness of God's plan in creating Black people black.

It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the negro who creates negritude.

I write because I am a Black woman, listening attentively to her people.

We live in a world with serious class complexes. It is one thing to be a college student with loan debts and another thing to be just dirt poor for your entire life. The challenge is to come up with more complex understandings of where we are, more global awareness of what connects Americans with what is happening with suffering and oppressed people all around the world.

When I walk out into the street or go to the toilet, I don't think of myself as being black. Of course, other people think of me as black when I walk into a pub. Obviously being black is a part of me.

I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.

I love my own culture. I love my African-American culture very deeply, and I know it deserves to be honored. You have to be aware that people are suffering unjustly, and given our own history we have a duty to stand for the people who are being treated like our parents and grandparents and children were treated.

Globalization in part means that a lot of people are walking into the room and in some cases becoming influential or even dominant voices in the conversation. Sometimes they are like party-crashers coming in and pushing people around, scooping up the valuables and eating up the food in the frig - bribing political leaders, undermining traditional economies and the ways of life that are interwoven with them, replacing them with new economic models that effectively exploit developing countries for their labor and resources.