Black Women Quotes - Page 14

• Specifically for black women, our images and our bodies in the media and in history have been so hypersexualized.

  Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

  Media, Black, Body

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I write to tell the truth about the black condition as I see it. Therefore, I write to offer a black woman's view of the world.

  Sonia Sanchez

  Writing, Views, Black

  Source: lunchticket.org

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• . . . black women . . . are trained from childhood to become workers, and expect to be financially self-supporting for most of their lives. They know they will have to work, whether they are married or single; work to them, unlike to white women, is not a liberating goal, but rather an imposed lifelong necessity.

  Gerda Lerner

  Self, White, Goal

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• You are a white. The Imperial Wizard. Now, if you don't think this is logic you can burn me on the fiery cross. This is the logic: You have the choice of spending fifteen years married to a woman, a black woman or a white woman. Fifteen years kissing and hugging and sleeping real close on hot nights. With a black, black woman or a white, white woman. The white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne. So you're not concerned with black or white anymore, are you? You are concerned with how cute or how pretty. Then let's really get basic and persecute ugly people!

  Lenny Bruce

  Cute, Real, Sleep

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• Usually, when people talk about the "strength" of black women . . . . they ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.

  Bell Hooks

  Strong, Confused, Reality

  bell hooks (2014). “Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism”, p.6, Routledge

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• Lord, I never seen blue hair on a black woman before or since. Leroy say you look like a cracker from outer space.

  Kathryn Stockett

  Hair, Blue, Space

  Kathryn Stockett (2009). “The Help”, p.240, Penguin

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• You can fall, but you can rise also.

  Angelique Kidjo

  Happiness, Moving On, Success

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• I would tell young people to start where they are with what they have and that the secret of a big success is starting with a small success and dreaming bigger and bigger dreams, I would tell them also that a young Black woman or a young Black man can't dream too much today or dare too much if he or she works hard, perseveres and dedicates themselves to excellence.

  John H. Johnson

  Success, Dream, Hard Work

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• The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder-in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

  Maya Angelou

  Block, Ghetto, Men

  "Bill Moyers Journal", billmoyers.com. November 21, 1973.

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• I look at Woody Allen's prolific career of 30 or 40 films, and I'm watching the clock. I'd love to work at a clip of a film a year. We don't get the benefit of the doubt, particularly black women. We're presumed incompetent, whereas a white male is assumed competent until proven otherwise. They just think the guy in the ball hat and the T-shirt over the thermal has got it, whether he's got it or not. For buzzy first films by a white male, the trajectory is a 90-degree angle. For us, it's a 30-degree angle.

  Dee Rees

  Thinking, Years, Careers

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• I believe that Christianity trains black people, especially black women, to think like slaves, and I believe that Islam is mainly fueled by its hatred for women.

  Kola Boof

  Believe, Thinking, People

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• There are more than 100 million African women who go topless at some point in the day, each and every day, to honor both God and our ancestors. So being in a country like America where nothing is hated more than the image of the black woman, even by black people'because her womb produces the black man and makes us black'I find it of grave importance to implement African images, and especially to produce media images that acknowledge the sexual power and fertility of black women.

  Kola Boof

  Country, Men, America

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• I'm an African woman, I suppose these thoughts torture me more than they do black American people, because it's like watching my own children trapped in a car that's sinking to the bottom of a lake and being impotent to save them'the black Americans have their own holocaust going on. You see the black man erasing black children from the landscape, you see black women desperately trying to get the black man's attention by wearing blonde hair and fake blue eyes, 500 years after he sold her and their children across the ocean.

  Kola Boof

  Children, Ocean, Eye

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• Here I am, the artist, the person, the black woman, and the stereotype. I'm using myself and it has nothing to do with my muses or other women. It has to do with me. You see parts of my body moving, very collage like, flashing, and not speaking, just laying on a couch, looking out at the viewer.

  Mickalene Thomas

  Moving, Artist, Here I Am

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.

  Bell Hooks

  Happiness, Success, Perseverance

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• When black women are down with you and in your corner, you have an ally that will move Heaven and Earth.

  Tyler Perry

  Strong Women, Moving, Heaven

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• As indicated by the increase in maternal mortality in 2010, right now it's more dangerous to give birth in California than in Kuwait or Bosnia. Amnesty International reports that women in [the United States] have a higher risk of dying due to pregnancy complications than women in forty-nine other countries (black women are almost four times as likely to die as white women). The United States spends more than any other country on maternal health care, yet our risk of dying or coming close to death during pregnancy or in childbirth remains unreasonably high.

  Jessica Valenti

  Country, Pregnancy, White

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• This is a career about images. It's celluloid; they last for ever. I'm a black woman from America. My people were slaves in America, and even though we're free on paper and in law, I'm not going to allow you to enslave me on film, in celluloid, for all to see.

  Angela Bassett

  Law, Careers, America

  "Question time". Interview with Hannah Pool, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2009.

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• Black women's feelings of responsibility for nurturing the children in their own extended family networks have stimulated a more generalized ethic of care where black women feel accountable to all the black community's children.

  Patricia Hill Collins

  Children, Responsibility, Community

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• I wish I could be the black woman Soderbergh, and put the camera on my shoulder and shoot beautifully while I directed.

  Ava DuVernay

  Black, Wish, Cameras

  "10 Questions With Ava DuVernay ('I Will Follow,' Middle Of Nowhere,” AFFRM)". www.indiewire.com. November 11, 2011.

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• I make films about Black women and it doesn't mean that you can't see them as a Black man, doesn't mean that he can't see them as a white man or she can't see them as a white woman.

  Ava DuVernay

  Mean, Men, White

  "Filmmaker Ava DuVernay". "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. October 9, 2012.

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• Year after year, author/historian William Loren Katz continues to mine the lodestone of Black culture, and it is simply amazing how often he manages to find new treasures. Here, with the same insight he brought to Black Indians and his other books, the author traces the courageous role of Black women in settling the West. He deftly shows how these pioneering spirits helped stabilize early communities in Texas, Oklahoma, California and elsewhere.

  Herb Boyd

  Book, Oklahoma, Texas

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• There is a big risk for the Republicans in a race, especially with Hillary Clinton as a likely Democratic nominee in a contest that will focus on the possibility of the first woman president to be six months suspending up the nomination of a black woman, who is imminently qualified.

  Barack Obama

  Race, Focus, Risk

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• As a Black woman filmmaker I feel that’s my job: visibility. And my preference within that job is Black subjectivity. Meaning I’m interested in the lives of Black folk as the subject. Not the predicate, not the tangent.[These stories] deserve to be told. Not as sociology, not as spectacle, not as a singular event that happens every so often, but regularly and purposefully as truth and as art on an ongoing basis, as do the stories of all the women you love.

  Ava DuVernay

  Art, Jobs, Black

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• Time will tell ... whether folks want to point and stare at the black woman filmmaker who made a certain kind of film, and pat her on the back, or if they want to actually roll up the sleeves and do a little bit of work so that there can be more of me coming through.

  Ava DuVernay

  Black, Want, Littles

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