Black Studies Quotes

“One can never "fall" in love, you must rise to it's level of consciousness. Love is not a feeling, it's a state of MIND!”
― T.C. Carrier

“What is the black shadow? It's the running inner dialogue we have with ourselves all day long about our fears of being inferior as black people. It is our internalization of the white man's lie that blacks are inferior to whites -- the very lie that was the foundation of our ancestors' enslavement. The black shadow is more than simply internalized racism; it's also our complex feelings of fear and despair about being black, and consequently our longing to be less black.”
― Marlene F. Watson, Facing the Black Shadow

“The notion that Google/ Alphabet has the potential to be a democratizing force is certainly laudable, but the contradictions inherent in its projects must be contextualized in the historical conditions that both create and are created by it.”
― Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

“I was jealous, of course, partly that by avoiding the academic race beat, Genie had sidestepped the daily trauma of the historical record, the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“I owe endless gratitude to my ancestors whose names I'll never know—and to my as-yet-unconceived children whose names I don't yet know: I already love you, though I've never met you; I already miss you, though I haven't left you; I don't even know you, but I can't forget you.”
― La Marr Jurelle Bruce

“No group is worth joining if everybody is welcome.”
― Jim Grimsley

“If I am a man, I am a man who always questions, who is driven to ask with a visceral urgency as irresistible and insatiable as an itch in a fold of my brain.”
― La Marr Jurelle Bruce

“Every belief, every word, every phrase, every observation, every proposition, every citation, every punctuation mark is subjected to ruthless doubt and viscious interrogation. The conventions of grammar oblige me to end most of these sentences with periods, but there are ghostly, invisible lines curling and hovering over most of these tiny dots. What I mean is that most of the periods in this book are interrogation marks in disguise. Most of these declarations are really restless questions underneath.”
― La Marr Jurelle Bruce