A lot of times, black people were extremely cool, and that's how we've been commodified in TV and film. But now we're starting to see an upswing of material where we're like, 'It's cool to be quirky and weird and smart.'
I was at all-white schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade, so I wanted to feel what it was like just to be me and not, like, Black Amy.
My mother's favorite photograph was one of herself at twenty-four years old, unbearably beautiful, utterly glamorous, in a black-straw cartwheel hat, dark-red lipstick, and a smart black suit, her notepad on a cocktail table. I know nothing about that woman.
Each black hole spins on its axis like the Earth spins. That spin creates two vortexes of twisting space, somewhat like vortexes in a bathtub or a whirlpool.
Every black film feels like it's Tyler Perry, and that just needs to stop. But people seem to slowly be looking for what else is out there - 'Is there something else besides this type of humor?' 'I'm tired of seeing men in dresses.'
A lot of my chosen family is black and I say that unabashedly. For anyone who doesn't understand that, they just don't understand me and my generation because especially in the LGBT community, the concept of chosen family is so important and it's a survival tactic.
Trump started talking about bringing back stop-and-frisk, which was ruled unconstitutional. And as a black man, that was the last thing I wanted to hear. That you will basically pass laws to say that I can be profiled, and it is legal.
Black Lives Matter was born out of our unwavering love for black people and our undeniable rage over a system that has historically dehumanized black people.
The 'black rule' is that youth unemployment is, on average, double a country's unemployment rate.
Our nation's oldest sin and deepest crime is the isolation of minority children - black children, in particular - in schools that are not only segregated but shamefully unequal.
'The Cosby Show' was a show about black people that was fundamentally and unequivocally friendly to whiteness and to white people. The Huxtables had white friends.
When I talk about 'working class,' I don't talk about 'white working class,'. I talk about 'working class,' and a third of working class people are people of color. If you are black, white, brown, gay, straight, you want a good job. There is no more unifying theme than that.
You can't separate the phenomenal birth of unionism in the United States of America from the Pullman porters. This same small group of men, who grew to be 10,000 strong, was also the organizational foundation for the civil rights movement and all of the gains that were made in the '40s and the '50s. That, and the black church.
As a black woman, I feel like I have a unique experience that we don't often see in media portrayals of the South.
We are presented with a unique situation in the black community in that we have embraced the beauty of hip hop, the real rawness of it, the real fun of it, but we also have to address the damage it has done. We have to look at what it's done to our black girls, especially when it comes to domestic violence.
It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.
So black people all across this country are uniting. They must unite, and they must organize themselves.
Religion looms as large as an elephant in the United States, to the point that being nonreligious is about the biggest handicap a politician running for office can have, bigger than being gay, unmarried, thrice married, or black.
A typical native New Yorker, I'm prone to wearing the city's unofficial sartorial color: black.
There's this idea that many of the attitudes and personality developments in black folks in the diaspora are a consequence of this unresolved trauma. There have been attempts by black artists to try and figure out how to represent that in some kind of way.
