racial significance Quotes

I wonder what it's like to be from a state that is spread across a few islands way out in the Pacific Ocean, only added to the United States in 1959. Not only that but to be the birthplace of America's first black president? Pretty cool, I bet.

I was born and raised in St. Louis, and this little town, eight blocks away, place no one ever heard of, a black man there commands the attention of the world for months? That ain't my world.

Obama provides hope. Whether he does anything, the hope that he provides for a nation and outside of America is enough. Just being who he is. You're the first black president. If he speaks on any issue or anything, he should be left alone.

In interviews with dozens of black advisers, friends, donors and allies, few said they had ever heard Mr. Obama muse on the experience of being the first black president of the United States, a role in which every day he renders what was once extraordinary almost ordinary.

I've never been one to carry race on my sleeve, and I've never been one to really use my race.

Quite frankly, black folks have always been at the core of what it's meant to make this nation human.

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

There were people who voted for Obama simply because he was the first African-American. We had a lot of people that would not have voted for Obama but who did because they really hoped that the nation, making the statement electing an African-American president, would prove once and for all that this is not a racist nation. I believe that there were all kinds of people that voted for Obama with that hope. That was the reason. Everything else was irrelevant to them.

The adoring crowds and overwhelming Democratic support in the 2008 election was based largely on joy at jettisoning Bush and the appeal of electing a superbly qualified charismatic African American leader.

If Obama's enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country's first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop's foundational generation.

I've often been a little concerned by people who say they are color-blind, people who claim, in some ways, not to be aware of race, and I hope that those who will be looking for a vision of the future will be a little more honest, and say race actually does matter.

I think that many black people thought this would be a wonderful and extraordinary thing, for a black family to occupy the White House. Not only black people; a lot of white people thought that, too, but particularly black people.

I love Obama, and I love the fact that it's a black president of the United States of America, but he's not the first black president. Robert Mugabe is a black president, too, so let's not get to talking about precedents being set.

It's an important moment [win an Emmy]. I just feel like I want it to happen tonight, either for myself or Viola [Davis] so we can get past it, so it's not big news anymore. I mean, it is 2015. We have a black president.

Would America have been America without her Negro people?

After Jackie Robinson the most important black in baseball history is Reggie Jackson, I really mean that.

The folkish philosophy is fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason of the fact that the former recognizes the significance of race and therefore also personal worth and has made these the pillars of its structure. These are the most important factors of its view of life.

The small moments I've had to talk with President Obama, I've told him, 'I get it.' His presidency was in some ways almost overshadowed by the fact that he was the first black president.

Race seems to me to be less and less a subject worth discussing.

Obama is the first African-American president, and for some people, that means a great deal, and for some people, it means very little.

I have a lot of respect for President Obama, and while I deeply disagree with some of his actions or lack of action on issues I care about, I still recognize the significance of the first black presidency and the challenges that come with that.

We simply cannot insist that race should not matter when everything in life argues that it does.

Im not really about blackness, per se, but about blackness and whiteness, and what they mean and how they interact with one another and what power is all about.

African-Americans who might have disagreed with candidate Obama's left-of-center politics voted for him in 2008 because electing a candidate with brown skin was too historic an opportunity to miss.