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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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 глубине 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...

“first.
anti.blackness: black is non.
second.
fetish: black non ness is. fascination. taboo. obsession. necessary
consumption.
third.
exotic: the act of making black non ness acceptable. touchable.
valuable.
fourth.
anti.blackness: black is non.
— the box circle”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Nejma

“always docile.
always stud.
always inept.
always killing.
always ugly.
always dumb.
always drugs.
always loathing.
always tragic.
always lurking.
always animal.
always respectable. politics.
always high white.
always fetish black.
always unpowered.
always hyperbolic.
always fear.
always on fire.
always impotent.
always destruction.
always spectacle.
always shatter.
always exacted into the perfect porn star.
to bring the world to orgasm.
— emotional porn (the black image industry)”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Nejma

“you are not racism.
you are not racism.
you are not racism.
you are not racism.
you are not racism.
your skin is not burden.
there is no mark against you.
your being is a holy beauty.
you.
are a holy beauty.
— ether”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Nejma

“melanin is memory.
is the blue weight of the ocean.
sewn into the red dusk of sky. living in the soil of your body.
it is alive.
leaping and sweeping you. against.
into the sun.
your skin was the first astronaut.
the first in space.
you touch. talk. are intimate with the sun. everyday. and do not
perish.
melanin.
is the world. before this world.
before the word. slave.
during the word. slave.
after the word. slave.
it is the books. written into yourself.
wild math in the pads of your feet.
soft science in your hair.
language down your back. invention in
your mouth.
melanin is why you are still alive.
after. the torching.
it is a second lung. the next heart. and the next heart. and the next.
a never ending. regenerative.
breathing thing.
a ceremony of life. while you are asleep.
a cosmos. in conversation.
immortal.
melanin is a wisdom that knew.
hate would be the anti light come to
devour. defile. destroy.
a wisdom that did not flinch.
a wisdom that is not bothered by such things.
melanin is memory.
future memory.
past memory.
your memory.
the memory of life. all.
in your skin.
— melanin”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Nejma

“you want a romance with my blackness.
and how it holds you.
how it illuminates your skin. makes you break your
breath. against itself.
and how is this possible.
when your world has never made you breath. not once. ever. but
my blackness
makes
you think about yourself. in a way you have never. and you are
open. a question. alive. and now
hungry.
my blackness is your first love.
you are convinced it is. showing you what your eyes could
‘never’ see before. a ‘world’ bigger. brighter. dark. dusky
and
wild. unashamed of itself. rebellious.
and it’s cosmic. your relationship with how the night rolls off me
into your hands.
you and my blackness are soul mates.
you met so
you could learn. more. expand.
because you always knew you were not like the others. who made
sure they ate one white thing every day.
no. you
were
always uncomfortable with yourself.
you wear my culture around your neck. bask in and praise its
jewels. pick it up on days when you want
attention.
put it
down
when it starts
to stain. (you don’t want to be disrespectful and take more than
you should. you just want to be a part of
something so beautiful.)
my blackness came to save you.
came to help you escape. the clutches of racism. of having that
beast anywhere inside you. around you.
next to you.
your comfort. intimacy. proximity.
with my blackness
confirms. and affirms.
your nonracism. your lack of hate.
it is this heady trip. this painful awesome tryst. that brings you.
flushed and moon eyed. to my door
with thank yous. and
i love yous. you have taught me to be a better person. you have
changed my life.
but
this was never a relationship.
i have no idea who you are.
and i laugh
incredulous and insulted.
at the notion
that
my blackness could ever be your first love. that my blackness is
your freedom.
that my blackness is yours.
— fetish”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Nejma

“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

“If you tell have of them that work in those places that they have somethin' to do with Africa they'd piss straight in your face."

But why you goin' to tell a man that for," said Mr. Foster, "Why tell a man he's somebody brother when he ain't?"

"'Tis true," said Bob's father, "no man like to know he black." (p.102)”
― George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin

“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

“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

“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