If not as a true human, let me tell you as a Biologist, color of the skin does not define an individual’s intelligence – it does not define an individual’s ambitions - it does not define an individual’s dreams – and above all, it does not define an individual’s character.

— Abhijit Naskar

If origin defines race, then we are all Africans – we are all black.

— Abhijit Naskar

If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.- Toni Morrison

— Sean Liburd

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular. And you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feelings as vast as your own, who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in the nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks to loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress making, and knows inside herself that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. Slavery is the same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and describes this world in essential texts. A world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave. Hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave. And when this woman peers back into the generations, all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren, but when she dies, the world, which is really the only world she can really know, ends. For this woman enslavement is not a parable, it is damnation, it is the never ending night, and the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains, whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I'll go further and say she was one of the best cooks in the world! The complimentary expression, "This food will make you slap yo' Ain't Emma" was apt in her case.

— Mars Hill

I'm American. Why didn't I say I was African American? Because I'm in a foreign country? But can I really consider myself to be in a foreign country when I could go walking back to my own country right now if I wanted, and it wouldn't even take very long? Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?

— Roberto Bolaño

Inspire, celebrate, and empower our Black males. Support them in becoming confident, intelligent, strong, capable, and powerful Black men, teens, and boys. There’s GREAT power in Black male positivity!

— Stephanie Lahart

In the biological sense, race does not exist.

— Abhijit Naskar

I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why'd she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn't she care about the others? Today, I zoomed out and wondered why I'm still in America.

— Darnell Lamont Walker

Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation’s history?

— Philip Dray