Blackness Quotes

“Most people write me off when they see me.
They do not know my story.
They say I am just an African.
They judge me before they get to know me.
What they do not know is
The pride I have in the blood that runs through my veins;
The pride I have in my rich culture and the history of my people;
The pride I have in my strong family ties and the deep connection to my community;
The pride I have in the African music, African art, and African dance;
The pride I have in my name and the meaning behind it.
Just as my name has meaning, I too will live my life with meaning.
So you think I am nothing?
Don’t worry about what I am now,
For what I will be, I am gradually becoming.
I will raise my head high wherever I go
Because of my African pride,
And nobody will take that away from me.”
― idowu koyenikan, Wealth for all Africans: How Every African Can Live the Life of Their Dreams

“All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

(The actual Sylvia Plath quote from "The Moon and the Yew Tree" is:

"And the message of the yew tree is blackness –
blackness and silence.")”
― from the movie "Sylvia" (2003), incorrectly attributed to Sylvia Plath

“A song she heard
Of cold that gathers
Like winter's tongue
Among the shadows
It rose like blackness
In the sky
That on volcano's
Vomit rise
A Stone of ruin
From burn to chill
Like black moonrise
Her voice fell still...”
― Robert Fanney

“I preach darkness. I don't inspire hope—only shadows. It's up to you to find the light in my words.”
― Charles Lee

“It’s bad enough . . . when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

“If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today - even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement - invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance with death.”
― Frank B. Wilderson III

“As we duel, as we chat, there's an understanding that "your black is not my black" and "your weird is not my weird" and "your beautiful is not my beautiful," and that's okay. It' brings tears to my eyes if I think about it too long.”
― Brittney Morris, Slay

“Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“Outside, the sun shines. Inside, there’s only darkness. The blackness is hard to describe, as it’s more than symptoms. It’s a nothing that becomes everything there is. And what one sees is only a fraction of the trauma inflicted.”
― Justin Ordoñez, Sykosa

“Let my toes teach the shore
how to feel a tranquil life
through the wetness of sands

Let my heart latch the door
of blackness, as all my pain
now blue sky understands”
― Munia Khan

“Emmanuel started learning the basics of his Blackness before he knew how to do long division: smiling when angry, whispering when he wanted to yell.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black

“If you remove Al Sharpton’s blackness, he disappears. He’s transparent. There’s nothing there because he bases his whole life on his blackness. Me, I’m a black man; but my blackness has submission to my Christianity.”
― Ken Hutcherson

“...в самой глубин�� души у Корнелия жило опасливое понимание, что эта бодрость, этот счастливый настрой могут оказаться недолгими. И опять придёт уныние, неуверенность. Страх...”
― Vladislav Krapivin, Выстрел с монитора. Гуси-гуси, га-га-га...

“For most black people in Europe, the battle against prejudice is for life, which is why you have to pace yourself to run a marathon instead of exerting all your energy in a spring if you want to survive — you can’t be throwing beer bottles at police and telling them to fuck themselves simply for the fun of it.”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

“For who else would teach rhythm to the world that has died of machines and cannons? For who else should ejaculate the cry of joy, that arouses the dead and the wise in a new dawn? Say, who else could return the memory of life to man with a torn hope?… They call us men of death. But we are the men of the dance whose feet only gain power when they beat the hard soil”
― Léopold Sédar Senghor, Chants d'ombre suivi de Hosties noires

“The void has no stake in the world's continuing existence. It's home as well to countless millions of meteorites. Some of them enormous. Trundling across the blackness at forty miles a second. I think if there were anything to care it would have cared by now.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“We praise their names / & the hands that write / Praise the mouth that speaks,”
― Mahogany L. Brown

“Do not underestimate or underappreciate 
The beauty and the power of the Blackness

With time, the sun, and the stars, will dissipate.
But still await and remain, everlastingly, the Darkness.”
― Ricardo Derose

“The condition of being alienated and "othered" reflects the ways in which navigating Western societies as a Black person is an endlessly unsettling experience, something that might be ripped whole from the pages of a speculative novel. Because of this, the search for lost cultural touchstones is a gesture towards survival: it is an Afrofuturistic act. At its heart it is the creation of a possible future based on a reconstructed, or reimagined past. In this way, a ware is wages against erasure.”
― Esi Edugyan, Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling

“A few weeks into our stay, I made a friend who wanted to improve his English as much as I wanted to improve my French. We met one day out in the crowd in front of Notre Dame. We walked to the Latin Quarter. We walked to a wine shop. Outside the wine shop there was seating. We sat and drank a bottle of red. We were served heaping piles of meats, bread, and cheese. Was this dinner? Did people do this? I had not even known how to imagine it. And more, was this all some elaborate ritual to get an angle on me? My friend paid. I thanked him. But when we left I made sure
he walked out first. He wanted to show me one of those old buildings that seem to be around every corner in that city. And the entire time he was leading me, I was sure he was going to make a quick turn into an alley, where some dudes would be waiting to strip me of…what, exactly? But my new friend simply showed me the building, shook my hand, gave a fine bon soirée, and walked off into the wide open night. And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I wished I felt nothing.

I wished my human heart had been changed with the rest of me, made into immortal marble. Instead of the shredded bits of blackness that it now was, leaking its ichor into me.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“This entire experience, although seemingly harmless in the grand cosmic scheme of life, was a perfect microcosm of the American dream. The good minority earned his rank by beating up the bad minority--a tale as old as the founding of this country. You try to gain as much proximity to whiteness and as much distance as you can from Blackness or the villain of the day, in order to become accepted by the mainstream.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“I was also aware of the fact that in the black community, respectability politics was often seen as being at odds with what it meant to be "authentically black." To me, there was not such thing as being authentically black. OF course, being seen as "authentically white" wasn't something my white peers had to concern themselves with.”
― Zachary Wood, Uncensored

“Many black intellectuals spoke about the experience of racism mainly, and sometimes exclusively, from a black male perspective, highlighting the various ways their humanity had been degraded and denied. While this discussion was something I cared about deeply, it was rarely balanced with one about all the unique ways in which black women have suffered. Even the scholars who spoke about race without focusing so much on the particular experience of black men still failed to fully capture and dissect the compounded challenges black women faced as they dealt with racism and sexism. The result of discussions of race being unfairly tilted toward the male point of view is that the experiences of black women have taken a backseat to those of black men, although they've suffered in ways that black men haven't. Racism and sexism were stacked against them. And too often they've borne the brunt of the very masculinity that has been historically debased in black men when black men asserted their power over the only people they could - black women...The hard truth is that black men have contributed to these struggles both subtly and overtly...we contribute to the degradation of black women by glorifying the kind of common rap that reduces them to bitches, hoes, and body parts.”
― Zachary Wood, Uncensored

“Your Blackness is undeniable and you do not have to adhere to society's idea of what Blackness is.”
― Olivia V.G. Clarke, Black Girl, White School: Thriving, Surviving and No, You Can't Touch My Hair

“Racism has permeated psychology and psychiatry from its genesis. Early clinicians came from white, European backgrounds, and used their culture's social norms as the basis for what being healthy looked like. It was a very narrow and oppressive definition, which assumed that being genteel, well-dressed, well-read, and white were the marks of humanity, and that anyone who deviated from that standard was not a person, but an animal in need of being tamed.”
― Devon Price, Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

“That morning, like every morning, the first decision he made regarded his Blackness. His skin was a deep, constant brown. In public, when people could actually see him, it was impossible to get his Blackness down to anywhere near a 1.5. If he wore a tie, wing-tipped shoes, smiled constantly, used his indoor voice, and kept his hands strapped and calm at his sides, he could get his Blackness as low as 4.0.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black

“I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was,” says Paul D. So, what is the being of blackness? Ultimately, (anti)blackness appears to be a matrix: a mold, a womb, a binding substance, a network of intersections, functioning as an encoder or decoder. It is an essential enabling condition for something of, but distinguishable from, its source—and therefore, it performs a kind of natality, performing a generative function rather than serving as an identity. If (anti)blackness is a matrix, then the normative conception of “the human” and the entire set of arrangements Sweet Home allegorizes have their source in abject blackness. In the process of distinguishing itself from blackness, normative humanity nevertheless bears the shadowy traces of blackness’s abject generativity. As “the defined” rather than the “definers,” the enslaved’s abjection places blackness under the sign of the feminine, the object, matter, and the animal regardless of sex.”
― Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

“When I rebelled, even here in the ‘enlightened’ twenty-first century, I was lumbered with with the feeling that I was rebelling on the behalf on an entire people, and when I refrained from rebelling it was to challenge the opinion that I was proof of a black problem; acts of resistance considered fair game when enacted by white people assume a dangerous radical hue in the eyes of Western society when carried out by blacks. In essence, I wasn’t comfortable enough in my own skin in this Antifa stuff, partly because I felt the colour of that skin carried its own surplus surreality in the surroundings i grew up in; I could be wearing an Oxford shirt and chinos and driving a Toyota Prius, and still be enough of an outsider.”
― Johny Pitts

“Dear Black Man (Poem)

*****

I love you because
you make me feel things that I have never felt before.
You erase my pain
and you bring me so much gain.
You embrace me and hide me
in your well built African and manly body.
You make me want to never look at other bodies.

I love how you cut your hair.
I love to feel your love in the air.
The texture of your hair, so beautiful, so artistic.
Your beautiful smile, so amazing;
it reminds me of hiding places.
You walk like you own the world;
at least, I assure you that you own mine
and the rest of my words.

Black Man, you are beautiful.
Your skin tone is so dark,
it makes me want to bark.
Please allow me to run my hands
on the hills of that skin.
You are handsome, my amazing king.

The way you speak your language.
The way you speak your Xhosa. Your Hausa.
Your Zulu. Your Kituba. Your Tswana.
Your Lingala. Your Venda. Your Gadomba.
Your Tsonga. Your Shona. Your Bateke.
Your Ga. Your Sotho. Your Igbo.

Your eyes.
Black Man, your eyes
tell me a story never heard before.
You teach me;
from your wisdom, I learn.
From your strength, I know 'I can'.
Black Man, they enslaved you
because they found you intimidating.
But today, they look for you
to be their mate in dating.

You look at my stretchmarks with an eye of an artist.
You appreciate my big behind with no judgement.
You kiss my big lips with love.
And in my big thighs, you hide.
You love me when I have no hair.
You love me when I have fake hair.

Black Man, I thought of you and I wrote to you.
All hail the Black king!

From your Black Woman,
(with African curves) .”
― Mitta Xinindlu