Darryl Pinckney Quotes

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

I think until Britain acknowledges just how much of a presence black people had here before the Sixties, then there are certain stories that are not going to be inclusive of what I have to offer.

If you don't feel apologetic for slavery, if you don't feel apologetic for colonialism, if you feel proud of it then say that.

I am an African-American in America. That will never change. But I don't have to be defined by that.

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

Fighting for identity is something that is very much in my life.

Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?

My grandparents would never admit to being Tasmanian, but I think it's really great and funny. But I guess, in the past, Tasmanians just weren't quite accepted. You had that lazy reference to them being felons.

Decolonization actually boosted slavery. As foreign powers withdrew from the colonies, people were enslaved by their own countrymen. And we see it in Africa, we see it in Asia.

Except in Haiti, nowhere in the world have we resisted you. We have suffered, we have grown dull and like cattle under a whip, obeyed. Why? Because, m'sieu, we have no pride! And we have no pride because we have nothing to remember.... While I live I shall try to build that pride we need, and build it in terms white men as well as black can understand. I am thinking of the future, m'sieu, not of now. I will teach pride if my teaching breaks every back in my kingdom.

I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

British Empire

These natives prefer the name of Americans to that of Creoles, since the peace of Versailles, and particularly since 1789, one often hears them say with pride: “I am not a Spaniard, I am an American.”

Columbians prefer to descend to the eternal abysses rather than be Spaniards.

When Britain first, at Heaven's command, Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of the land, And guardian angels sung this strain: 'Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.'

Royal African Company

When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.

When Pakistan beat England at cricket, my Pakistani cousins remind me how English and British I am. When they say, 'You're one of the Queen's advisers,' for them it's, 'Wow - anything's possible in the U.K.'

I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?

The invention of the African American, or the Haitian or Jamaican, is a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade.

As well as our relationship with Afghanistan, I am researching the legacy of other European empires - in Africa. We think of those empires as history, but actually, they still haunt our everyday lives in the strangest of ways.

It's depressing to see blacks wanting to dive into the mainstream of American commercial life. They come from a magnificent African culture based on aesthetics, and they all want to become fort builders like the vicious people who originally enslaved them.

We're not Americans, we're Africans who happen to be in America. We were kidnapped and brought here against our will from Africa. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock - that rock landed on us.

Do you realize how many people of this country have been educated, have grown up, who have been taught that, yeah, we're at risk and there's a lot of people that want to blow us up and don't like us. But we are to blame. That's what they've been taught. We are to blame, 'cause there was slavery, because we've stolen all these goods and resources from other countries. We have imposed our way of life on them! We've sent our military around, and we've conducted wars on their territory and so forth.