Best black & class Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“I was always the only black in the movie theater, the only black in class, the only black in the library, the only black in the discotheque. I always felt observed and judged.”

Felt Black Class Theater Library Judged Movie Theater

Author:Concha Buika

“Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?”

Black Class Taught Regard Injustice Why Not Inferiors Exploits

Book:The Mis-Education of the Negro

Source: The Mis-Education of the Negro

“You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind....Cain slew his brother. Can might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings. This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin.”

“The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago?”

“The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the "legitimate" votes of suburban, white, middle-class, affluent males. Even liberal voters and organizations tend on some tacit level to accept the idea that they are not the "real" Americans the Democrats must pursue.”

Want Feels Ideas Real Black White Levels Accepting Class Middle Female Vote Organization Democratic Democrat Males Pursue Middle Class Voters Elites Working Class Affluent Tacit

Author:Ellen Willis

“In a manner akin to the influence of Tiger Woods on the other side of the Atlantic, Thierry Henry has helped kick down a few of the remaining bigoted stereotypes. Through his undisputable class and dignity, Henry has made a deep-seated difference to race relations in this country. Racism will flounder whenever white children grow up with a black man as their hero. That so few comment on Henry's colour is a silent tribute to his impact.”

“Being Black and poor is, I think, radically different from being anything else and poor. Poor, to most Blacks, is a state of mind. Those who accept it are poor; those who struggle are middle class.”

Thinking Mind Different States Black Poor Accepting Class Poverty Struggle Middle Middle Class State Of Mind

Book:Sacred cows-- and other edibles

Source: Sacred cows-- and other edibles

“Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best.”

People Has Beens Art Reason Form Black White Class Media Music Is Decided Giants Black People

Author:Toni Morrison

“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”

Source: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

“Well everyone's a world class ground fighter until they get a punch to the face. So that's how I deal with all these ground fighters like everyone else. I hit 'em in the head and there goes your F**king black belt.”

World Wells Faces Black Deals Class Kings Fighter Ems Belts World Class Black Belt

Author:Mark Hunt

“There's no question that the black middle class has benefited greatly by the civil rights movement. But there is a large black underclass that does not have access to jobs. If there's no clear road to income and status except crime, we should expect social problems. You can't solve this problem without addressing the economic issues, and the same is true with gender.”

“If you put on a lousy production with white actors, it's lousy. There is a problem, or can be, at this stage of our social evolution, with mixing the casts. It may not be a question of race so much as class. You would rarely find a black man in a high executive position where he was swinging his weight around.”

Ifs Men May Problem Actors Social Black White Race Class Stage Position Evolution Weight Casts Productions Executives Mixing

Author:Howard Schultz

“Racial oppression of black people in America has done what neither class oppression or sexual oppression, with all their perniciousness, has ever done: destroyed an entire people and their culture.”

People Done America Culture Black Class Racism Oppression Destroyed Black People

Author:Eleanor Holmes Norton

“To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica's black mass.”

Giving Firsts Black White Class Mass Consequence Discrimination Posterity First Class Frantic Jamaica Stampede

Book:I Love Myself when I Am Laughing ... and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader

Source: I Love Myself when I Am Laughing ... and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader

“I don't want to know about the constitution of the rapist--I want to kill him! I don't care if he is white or black, if he is middle-class or poor, if his mother hung him from the clothesline by his balls: I only want to kill him! Any woman who has been raped will agree.”

Ifs Knows Want Has Beens Care Mother Black White Poor Class Middle Balls Constitution Agree Don't Care I Don't Care Middle Class Hung Clotheslines

Author:Diamanda Galas

“I'm tired of the naked, raped, beaten black woman body. I want to see an image of black femaleness that alters our universe in some way.”

“Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.”

Black Class Taken Middle Movement Oppression African American Middle Class Oppressed Black Women African American Women

Book:Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Source: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”

“Which is more like genocide, I have asked some of my black brothers - this, the way things are, or the conditions I am fighting for in which the full range of family planning services is available to women of all classes and colors, starting with effective contraception and extending to safe, legal terminations of undesired pregnancies at a price they can afford?”

Way Fighting Black Class Conditions Color Brother Safe Starting Available Planning Range Pregnancy Genocide Extending Contraception Family Planning Termination

Book:Unbought and Unbossed: Expanded 40th Anniversary Edition

Source: Unbought and Unbossed: Expanded 40th Anniversary Edition

“America certainly has made extraordinary progress. The collective unconscious of the nation has certainly shifted as a result of the civil rights movement and the developments in the '70s and '80s. We have witnessed a great expansion of the black middle class.”

“But for poor black people and working-class black people, it is a much more difficult way to go. The over-incarceration of black people is just intolerable. When you look at the disparity in terms of education and access to fair schooling, it is horrible. If this would happen to white people in this country, it would not be tolerated.”

People Ifs Way Looks Country Happens Difficult Black Term White Poor Class Fairs Access Horrible Black People Working Class Schooling Disparity Incarceration

Author:Michael Eric Dyson

“I come out of the environment of the Deep South, where I had seen the millstone of racial discrimination weighting down my people, both the black people and the white people; and I had seen the enormous progress that we were able to make after we removed the legal restraints of a two-class society, with the whites superior and blacks inferior. So I was very convinced before I became President that basic human rights, equality of opportunity, the end of abuse by governments of their people, was a basic principle on which the United States should be an acknowledged champion.”

“The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women's studies classes and said, "Black women have always worked."”

Firsts Said Facts Black White Class Study Feminism Black Women Bourgeois Reacting

Author:Bell Hooks

“Actually we've had a black bourgeoisie or the makings of a black bourgeoisie for many more decades.In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the US has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable. What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.”

“It doesn't surprise me that aspect of the black nationalist movement, the cultural side, has triumphed because that is the aspect of the movement that was most commodifiable and when we look at the commodification of blackness we're looking at a phenomenon that's very profitable and it's connection with the rise of a black middle class I think is very obvious.”

Thinking Looks Sides Black Class Middle Movement Aspect Connections Surprise Obvious Middle Class Phenomenon Profitable Blackness Surprise Me Commodification

Author:Angela Davis

“I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.”

Thinking Men Kind Important Hands Black Class Millions Struggle Middle Example Acknowledge Rely Middle Class March Commodity

Author:Angela Davis

“The colors black and white are my uniform, to honor the working class. People like my parents, who were janitors and had to wear a uniform every day. It keeps me grounded.”

People Parent Black White Class Color Honor Black And White Uniforms Working Class Grounded Janitor Color Black

Author:Janelle Monae

“The interesting thing about Georgia is, Atlanta is teeming with middle-class black people and black people with money - and yet there is still segregation.”

People Stills Black Interesting Class Middle Middle Class Black People Segregation Interesting Things Georgia Atlanta

Author:Richard Benjamin

“We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.”

People Facts Faces Fighting Black Water White Poor Talking Class Fire Mass Racism Capitalism Socialism Brown Yellow Solidarity Lower Class

Author:Fred Hampton

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