It slaps your dignity just right. I loved the idea of these proud, dignified black men, and I saw the older ones wounded, and it wounded me ten times as much because I couldn't stand seeing them hurt like this.
I do not diminish the incredible symbolic importance of a black man getting elected president. But my euphoria was a smart guy getting elected president. Maybe for the first time in my lifetime we had elected one of the thousand smartest Americans president.
I give thanks for the fact that I can get this stick with a bit of steel nib on the end, dip it in some black carbon stuff, and draw on paper. Now, people did it the same way 2,000 years ago. And there's something lovely about that play, and making mud pies and a mess. That's a lovely privilege.
We understand that, in our communities, black trans folk, gender-nonconforming folk, black queer folk, black women, black disabled folk - we have been leading movements for a long time, but we have been erased from the official narrative.
Now we Democrats believe that America is still the country of fair play, that we can come out of a small town or a poor neighborhood and have the same chance as anyone else, and it doesn't matter whether we are black or Hispanic, or disabled or women.
Do you know, it's funny, but I never thought of being blind as a disadvantage, and I never thought of being black as a disadvantage.
Black men with criminal records are the most severely disadvantaged group in the labor market.
You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.
Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white.
I was discriminated against because I was Jewish, Italian, black and Puerto Rican. But maybe the worst prejudice I experienced was against the poor. I grew up on welfare and often had to move in the middle of the night because we couldn't pay the rent.
We know that there are people in our nation, black people, who are systematically being disenfranchised in a number of spheres in our lives.
In 2004, there were more black men disenfranchised than in 1870 - the year the 15th Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that deny the right to vote exclusively on the basis of race.
I am no friend of the modern so-called 'black metal' culture. It is a tasteless, lowbrow parody of Norwegian black metal circa 1991-92, and if it was up to me, it would meet its dishonorable end as soon as possible.
Real leaders have to live a paradoxical life, where they must break the rules in order to maintain them. If your expectations are high, you're setting yourself up for disillusionment. The land of governance is paved with gray streets, not black or white ones.
To like an individual because he's black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn't white.
By dismantling the narrow politics of racial identity and selective self-interest, by going beyond 'black' and 'white,' we may construct new values, new institutions and new visions of an America beyond traditional racial categories and racial oppression.
I don't think it's different to be a black girl in England than it is to be a black girl from America. We all collectively share in a pain of displacement and not feeling like we quite belong in places.
In terms of the revolution, I believe that the revolution will be a revolution of dispossessed people in this country: that's the Mexican American, the Puerto Rican American, the American Indian, and black people.
The U.S. prison system, over all, disproportionately affects black and brown people, but people of color are overrepresented to a greater degree in private prisons.
We should not have drug laws or a court system that disproportionately punishes the black community.
