Unapologetically Black Quotes

One of feminism’s biggest failures is its failure to insist that feminism is, first and foremost, about truly, deeply, and unapologetically loving women.

You are here to remind people that it is OK to be whole. It is OK to shine your light. OK to be unapologetically you. In fact, it’s more than OK, it’s necessary in order to thrive. But you must go first.

Be careful about how you hide yourself from people who care. Your hiding could set up a life-or-death situation whereby you are in need and there is no one left to help.

Anything that strayed from the status quo was considered wild. And, she gave no apology. Leading the pack was her calm course of existence... and her freedom.

I am a Black Woman… An Unapologetic Exquisite Black Queen… Respect is Mandatory!

You need so much more than mental health or “well-being” in this era of discrimination, invisibility, and psychological warfare. You need an impermeable web of protection for your mind.

Authenticity is Why I Shine so Bright! My confidence, fearlessness, and success are a direct reflection of me being my unapologetic and authentic self. I am an Exquisite Black Queen… Phenomenal!

And the metaphorical lenses we choose are crucial, having the power to magnify, create better focus, and correct our vision.

There’s no reason for you to be jealous, envious, and/or intimidated by her. Step your game up, and be confident in yourself! Unapologetic Exquisite Black Queens aren’t intimidated by another woman’s confidence, beauty, or success. We don’t see them as a threat; We root for our Sistas, because that’s what phenomenal Black women do!

Being radical is a choice, and it takes work. A person with a marginalized identity can engage in conservative, oppressive political work, and activists, organizers, and intellectuals living under capitalism, colonialism, anti-Black racism, and patriarchy require years of unlearning or decolonization.

Black feminists and LGBTQ activists are labeled “hijackers” and said to be divisive or co-opting or distracting from what is important, and what is “important” is the mainstream narrative propped up by patriarchy and misogyny (straight-up hatred of women).

Unapologetic Exquisite Black Queen!

Steele gave the unapologetic impression that he could break you with his bare hands if it weren’t for his strict devotion to Jesus and army discipline.

Black Barbie? Nah… I’m an unapologetic Exquisite Black Queen who’s intelligent, creative, courageous, confident, ambitious, and authentic. My beauty is just a bonus!

Scientists can say with confidence that racism is bad for Black mental health.

Who is an Exquisite Black King? He’s a Black man… Confident, unapologetic, and fearless!

I’m an Unapologetic Exquisite Black Queen!

If you (or someone you care about) cannot take on as much as someone else, that does not make you either weak or crazy. You just have to prepare differently and live your life unapologetically for you.

Racism is apparently a card to be played; much like the joker, it’s a very versatile card that can be used in any situation that might require it. Only non-white people ever play this card to excuse their own personal failings - even those of us that are materially successful. Humans racialised as white cannot play the race card - just like they cannot be terrorists - so European national empires colonising almost the entire globe and enacting centuries of unapologetically and openly racist legislation and practices, churning out an impressively large body of proudly racist justificatory literature and cinema and much else has had no impact on shaping human history, it has really just been black and brown people playing cards.

My Blackness is just too much for some people to handle. I’m a confident, intelligent, beautiful, and powerful Black woman with greatness inside my DNA. I’m also straightforward, authentic, and unapologetic. I’m a driven, resilient Black woman with integrity, and I gladly take on challenges with my head held high. I’m not afraid to use my voice, I’m not afraid to be uniquely me, I’m not afraid to stand alone, and I’m not afraid to step outside of my comfort zone. I’m a Black Queen that doesn’t make excuses, I find solutions. I won’t apologize for being exquisite!

I want you to travel roads that aren’t there, build bridges where none exist, sing songs that haven’t been written. I want you to love yourself fiercely, love others courageously, love life unapologetically. I want you to shatter expectations, break out of cages, and dance in crowded streets while it rains.

We live in a country where people work forty or more hours a week and still live in poverty because they don’t earn a living wage ... Meritocracy is a lie.

I’d gone from unapologetically commit-o-phobic to rom-com heroine in a few months

An African proverb says, “When spiderwebs unite, they can tie up a lion.

EXQUISITE BLACK QUEEN... She's powerful, authentic, confident, fearless, unapologetic, intelligent, and successful.

Unapologetically Brainy Black Girl!

I’m not like the rest, I’m an Unapologetic Exquisite Black Queen!

His room was a sickly dual-tone of crimson and charcoal, like an Untitled Rothko, the colours bleeding into each other horribly and then rather serenely. The overall effect was overwhelmingly unapologetic but it grew on you like a wart on your nose you didn't realise it was a part of your identity until one day it simply was. His room was his identity. Fiercely bold, avant-garde but never monotonous. He was red, he was black, he was bored, and he was fire. At least to me he seemed like fire. A tornado of fire that burned all in its wake leaving only the wretched brightness of annihilation. His room was where he charmed and disarmed us. We were his playthings. Nobody plays with fire and leaves unscarred. The fire soon seeps into chard and soot. The colours of his soul, his aura, and probably his heart if he didn't stop smoking.

Our bodies cannot truly be hidden, no matter how many black outfits we wear. No matter how many pairs of Spanx we own. No matter how much we suck it in. Doesn't it seem like a better use of our time to just accept the fact that our bodies are our bodies and live our lives like there is no tomorrow? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes.

My Blackness is just too much for some people to handle. I’m a confident, intelligent, beautiful, and powerful Black woman with greatness inside my DNA. I’m also straightforward, authentic, and unapologetic. I’m a driven, resilient Black woman with integrity and I gladly take on challenges with my head held high. I’m not afraid to use my voice, I’m not afraid to be uniquely me, I’m not afraid to stand alone, and I’m not afraid to step outside of my comfort zone. I’m a Black Queen that doesn’t make excuses, I find solutions. I won’t apologize for being exquisite!

One could argue that people can only teach what they know. Or, looking at it from a different perspective, at some point we all lack knowledge about something until we choose or are forced to learn. Anyone committed to collective liberation must acknowledge ignorance and take up the work of comprehensive political education. For example, I have been out of my depth on disability justice and climate change, to name two topics, and so I follow the lead of people who are more knowledgeable. But this doesn’t let me off the hook: I still need to seek out knowledge on my own about these issues.

IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s. For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession. After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.

Honest to God, I hadn’t meant to start a bar fight. “So. You’re the famous Jordan Amador.” The demon sitting in front of me looked like someone filled a pig bladder with rotten cottage cheese. He overflowed the bar stool with his gelatinous stomach, just barely contained by a white dress shirt and an oversized leather jacket. Acid-washed jeans clung to his stumpy legs and his boots were at least twice the size of mine. His beady black eyes started at my ankles and dragged upward, past my dark jeans, across my black turtleneck sweater, and over the grey duster around me that was two sizes too big. He finally met my gaze and snorted before continuing. “I was expecting something different. Certainly not a black girl. What’s with the name, girlie?” I shrugged. “My mother was a religious woman.” “Clearly,” the demon said, tucking a fat cigar in one corner of his mouth. He stood up and walked over to the pool table beside him where he and five of his lackeys had gathered. Each of them was over six feet tall and were all muscle where he was all fat. “I could start to examine the literary significance of your name, or I could ask what the hell you’re doing in my bar,” he said after knocking one of the balls into the left corner pocket. “Just here to ask a question, that’s all. I don’t want trouble.” Again, he snorted, but this time smoke shot from his nostrils, which made him look like an albino dragon. “My ass you don’t. This place is for fallen angels only, sweetheart. And we know your reputation.” I held up my hands in supplication. “Honest Abe. Just one question and I’m out of your hair forever.” My gaze lifted to the bald spot at the top of his head surrounded by peroxide blonde locks. “What’s left of it, anyway.” He glared at me. I smiled, batting my eyelashes. He tapped his fingers against the pool cue and then shrugged one shoulder. “Fine. What’s your question?” “Know anybody by the name of Matthias Gruber?” He didn’t even blink. “No.” “Ah. I see. Sorry to have wasted your time.” I turned around, walking back through the bar. I kept a quick, confident stride as I went, ignoring the whispers of the fallen angels in my wake. A couple called out to me, asking if I’d let them have a taste, but I didn’t spare them a glance. Instead, I headed to the ladies’ room. Thankfully, it was empty, so I whipped out my phone and dialed the first number in my Recent Call list. “Hey. He’s here. Yeah, I’m sure it’s him. They’re lousy liars when they’re drunk. Uh-huh. Okay, see you in five.” I hung up and let out a slow breath. Only a couple things left to do. I gathered my shoulder-length black hair into a high ponytail. I looped the loose curls around into a messy bun and made sure they wouldn’t tumble free if I shook my head too hard. I took the leather gloves in the pocket of my duster out and pulled them on. Then, I walked out of the bathroom and back to the front entrance. The coat-check girl gave me a second unfriendly look as I returned with my ticket stub to retrieve my things—three vials of holy water, a black rosary with the beads made of onyx and the cross made of wood, a Smith & Wesson .9mm Glock complete with a full magazine of blessed bullets and a silencer, and a worn out page of the Bible. I held out my hands for the items and she dropped them on the counter with an unapologetic, “Oops.” “Thanks,” I said with a roll of my eyes. I put the Glock back in the hip holster at my side and tucked the rest of the items in the pockets of my duster. The brunette demon crossed her arms under her hilariously oversized fake breasts and sent me a vicious sneer. “The door is that way, Seer. Don’t let it hit you on the way out.” I smiled back. “God bless you.” She let out an ugly hiss between her pearly white teeth. I blew her a kiss and walked out the door. The parking lot was packed outside now that it was half-past midnight. Demons thrived in darkness, so I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’d been counting on it.

In Western culture, white womanhood is held up as the epitome of beauty and desire. Part of the machine of size discrimination is stripping white women of that status as punishment for fatness. There is a way in which body positive movements both reject the notion of the body as object while reclaiming it as beautiful by dismantling the definition. Black women’s bodies have always been objects in the social sphere, but are never exalted as beautiful. The fat Black woman’s body has been rendered as an object of service, whether for food, advice, care-taking, or other areas, but it has never been something to aspire to, not a thing of beauty.

I can’t be the only one. There have to be other people out there who see the Mr. Twister mascot for what he is: Hitler. A grinning, cartoon, twisty-cone version of the Führer himself, advertising to the world that this place is secretly Nazi central. There is no other logical reason to put one of those little black smudge mustaches on a custard mascot. Of course, I’ve got Annie in my head—Chill out, Mo. It’s obviously supposed to be Charlie Chaplin—so fine, where’s the cane? And the hat? Exactly. Hitler. This truck is an oven. I am pot roast. I’d go in, but I’m already throwing up a little in my mouth just thinking about the assault of peachy-ness behind those doors. Peach walls, peach aprons, peach countertops, peach chalk on the blackboard menu. And of course, Annie is in there smiling and faking brain-dead. I’m better off as pot roast, and besides, the Spanish Inquisition isn’t going to learn itself. I turn back to the previous page, the one that I’ve already read and forgotten three times this hour, and start over. The picture of Ferdinand II of Aragon is freakishly distracting. It’s the way he’s glaring. I close my right eye and glare back at him and his unapologetic scowl. I bet nobody told him to quit being cranky.

I’m an original! I have no desire to be like you, her, or them. This Unapologetic Exquisite Black Queen is unmatched! There is absolutely no reason for me to compete, copy, or envy other women. I rock on a phenomenal level!

Unapologetic Black Female Leaders think differently. We’re the few, fearless, strong, resilient, and NOT easily intimated Queens. Integrity, perseverance, and confidence run through our veins! We don’t have to cheat, lie, or manipulate to win. We impact, empower, and inspire ALL people for the betterment of the world. Our authenticity is what makes us POWERFUL and EXQUISITE. We are Black Women… The REAL game-changers!

We cannot deny the fears and struggles we’ve sometimes experienced as we remain committed to this critical principle. And, as you forewarned in the above quote, we’ve lost some people along the way. Many of them have wondered why non-Black authors cannot write for the series. Many have wondered why non-Black people cannot be featured prominently in it. Many have wondered why the series even exists. But as you also pointed out in the same quote, “sometimes we are afraid for too long.” Because of you and the work you’ve done to pave the way for us, we have learned to face our fears and unapologetically honor Black people and Black experiences.

A role could call for an indigenous Aeta woman and they would hire a half white, half Filipina woman and paint her skin Black just so she could play a maid.

The thing I know today, after many cycles of homegirls, many more years of girl crushes, and a life of straight sexual activity, is that one can’t truly be a feminist if you don’t really love women. And loving women deeply and unapologetically is queer as fuck. It is erotic in the way that Audre Lorde talks about eroticism. It’s an opening up, a healing, a seeing and being seen.

The meeting started well enough. Balsillie explained how BlackBerry could be synchronized with a user’s desktop computer calendar and contacts. You just have to put the device in this cradle, he said, pointing to a prototype. Normally, the cradle would have had a cable connecting it to the computer, but the cord was missing from the demonstration. One Intel executive, Sean Maloney, VP of worldwide sales, was confused. “What are you saying, how does it do that?” Maloney asked. Klimstra saw why the Intel executive was puzzled. He doesn’t realize there’s supposed to be a cable connecting the cradle to the computer, he thought. Balsillie appeared stumped too, saying nothing. To Klimstra, the lengthy silence that followed was agonizing. This must be my cue, he thought. Clearing his throat, Klimstra piped up: “That cradle is just a mock-up.” Maloney nodded as Klimstra explained it would normally have a cable attached. Balsillie turned to Klimstra. “Eric,” he said, growing cold with fury. “Don’t you ever, ever, ever, ever”—Klimstra’s stomach twisted with each “ever”—“interrupt me in a meeting again.” After an awkward silence, Balsillie continued the presentation. As they filed out after the meeting, Maloney’s eyes met Klimstra’s. The young evangelist could read the look: “Kid, I’m sorry if I got you fired.” Outside, Balsillie was unapologetic. “Never interrupt me when I’m in the zone,” he said. “I was very specific in directing them in a certain way and I didn’t want to go down any other path.” It wasn’t that Klimstra had said anything wrong. What bothered Balsillie was that he had said anything at all. “He could have been about to take us over a cliff” by inadvertently blurting out a corporate secret as he explained how the system worked, Balsillie says of his strict stick-to-the-script rule.

Black women are stereotyped as “workers” and have internalized this characterization by overachieving, self-sacrificing, and neglecting our health and dismissing the need for self-care. Black women must unapologetically prioritize rest as a part of the movement toward equity and liberation.

Nowadays, I try not to pay attention to what society deems beautiful or not. It isn’t always easy though, and I’m always trying to un-learn toxic thoughts and behaviours anytime I recognize it.

Fat womxn can be feminine. But it isn’t the be all and end all. We can be other things too. We can be alternative. We can be androgynous. We can be gender non-conforming and non-binary. We can be butch. We can be casual. We can be all these things and STILL have the right to exist and feel socially acceptable within society.

My music is not staid or proper, pretty or respectable. It is not for the mother looking for a biddable bride for her son at church or for the son looking for a pretty housekeeper to call his wife. It is adventurous and weighty, loud and boisterous, fuming when it wants to be and despondent when it needs to be. It is unapologetically emotional in a way I am never allowed to be without consequence. My music is a girl who behaves like a boy: flat shoes and comfortable slacks, loud-mouthed and ready to take on the world. My music is black in a place where black isn’t an insult: it’s shining, proud, and unworried. I let myself transform into wood and sound and vibration.

This was my idea of relationship goals. Black, unfiltered love that was displayed unapologetically.

She’s an Exquisite Black Queen! She's powerful, authentic, confident, fearless, unapologetic, intelligent, and successful. She is me!

Black women don’t have to cheat, lie, or manipulate to win. We are Unapologetic Exquisite Black Queens… The REAL game-changers!

The great irony, rarely recognized, is that abortion in America was initially conceived and advocated for the purpose of reducing the black population. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and one of the champions of the abortion rights movement, was an unapologetic eugenicist and a racist, and wanted minorities and the poor to have abortions.

The Obamas, for example, were clearly and unapologetically representatives of the bourgeois-imperialist order and yet they still experienced the racism generated by a white supremacist settler society. While it would be bizarre to assume that their experience of racism was the same as what was experienced by individuals in a poor black community in Ferguson, it would also be odd to claim that they were unaffected by racism altogether. Even still, in the last instance it is their class position that matters; such a position allowed the Obama presidency to align itself with the white supremacist settler-capitalism that over-determines the class structure of the US. It is no accident that Barack Obama refused to defend the Black Lives Matter movement, the multiple race rebellions that erupted at the end of his presidency, and went so far as to legitimate racist police violence by supporting “Blue Lives Matter” legislation. The racist structuring of the US class contradiction, despite nearly 8 years of “post-race” denial, is again revealing its intractability with the return of the repressed in the form of resurgent fascism, symptomized by Donald Trump’s election.

The dominance of the faith-based industrial complex is a Catch-22 for communities of color that lack adequate social welfare services and educational and recreational spaces under an American capitalist system that essentially outsources these services to private organizations and tax-exempt nonprofits.

Larsen’s portrayal of Black female atheism in her 1928 novel is

D. Frederick Sparks

deity.

birth, girls’ sexuality is a commodity, an object, an asset, and a “liability” to be marketed, bought, sold, and controlled in a birth-to-death cycle in which girls and women are straightjacketed by a litany of dos and (mostly) don’ts.

Flipping it another way; do gods give a damn about universal health care, access to stable, affordable housing, and the right to earn a living wage with benefits for everyone? What use are gods who don’t protect bodily autonomy and the right to self-determination for queer, nonbinary and gender nonconforming folks? What use are they if they don’t protect these rights for women or folks with disabilities? What do supernatural deities say about these specific socioeconomic, cultural, and social issues? Why do they remain abjectly silent if they are in fact omnipotent and omnipresent?

But, if gods are all-knowing, why do they rely on imperfect messengers to unpack and “screw up” interpretations of their doctrines across the centuries? If they are all powerful why do they allow predators and thieves to infest the leadership of every major religious denomination on the planet?

Blackness is not just black straight men. There are gay men in this work doing amazing work. There are queer folks. There are trans folks. There are gay and lesbian folks, bisexual…. There are atheist black people.

For many enslaved Africans, the Bible only became an avenue of resistance because it was one of the few books available to Black folks in a white, Christian-dominated society that prohibited Black literacy. Reading the Bible and applying its lessons of redemptive suffering, salvation, and struggle aided African Americans in their revolutionary fight against the “contradictions” of chattel slavery in a so-called democratic nation.

There’s nothing typical about me… I’m an Exquisite woman, wife, mother, and entrepreneur. I live my life authentically, fearlessly, and unapologetically.

this is not, or at least should not be, an #AllBodiesMatter situation. Of course, all bodies are equally important, and I hope that everyone reading this – whether they are a size 4 or a size 30 – feels good about themselves. But body positivity is not about boosting the confidence of people with conventionally attractive and ‘acceptable’ figures. It’s not about logging onto Instagram and seeing a barrage of attractive, white, thin (or thin adjacent) womxn bending over as HARD as possible to create a smidgen of a micro-roll in order to prove to their thousands of followers that they too (!!) are ‘normal, real, womxn’.

Being an ally is not like writing a CV, you cannot just build up a list of things you’ve done and wave it around in class like Hermione Granger on steroids. You don’t get a badge that you can pin onto your jacket and shine up so people notice it. It shouldn’t be performative. Once you become an ally, you’ve got to know the person or people you want to align with, and they’ve got to know you too. You have to build trust, and with that comes patience.

I was black before I was a Christian. Martin and Malcolm, therefore, had to go together, which meant being unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.

[C]an readers think of instances in which blacks publicly urged other blacks to set aside racial concerns, to consider themselves Americans first, and to work for the good of all? When have black authority figures expressed regret for even the most horrific anti-white crimes? When have blacks praised diversity if it meant giving up black majorities? How many wealthy blacks make charitable donations to broadly American rather than explicitly black institutions? When has a black person publicly chided other blacks for excessive concern with narrowly black issues? Blacks differ from whites both in what they say and do and what they do not say or do. We find among many blacks—perhaps the majority—a view of race sharply at odds with what the civil rights movement was presumably working for: the elimination of race as a relevant category in American life. White racism is commonly alleged to be the great obstacle to harmonious race relations in the United States, but whites are the only group that actually subscribes to the goal of eliminating race consciousness and that actively polices its members for signs of such consciousness. If whites were the great obstacle to harmony, it would be they who unapologetically put their interests first, who fantasized about killing blacks, who were careful to show they were “white enough,” and ostracized those who were not. Instead, any white person who spoke or acted in ways blacks take for granted would be hounded out of public life and scorned in private.

It was the Vietnam war that had set the left on this perfectionist course. Whereas Kissinger (and Hans Morgenthau) had seen the conflict as a mistake of America’s good intentions, the student protesters of the 1960s could think only in terms of black and white: the war was “evil,” meaning that those who prosecuted it were evil too, and no one was identified more with the war than Henry Kissinger. “Vietnam,” Bob Woodward has written, “was like a stone around his neck.” Opposition to the war was a sign of righteousness, with the children of light arrayed against the children of darkness. This was the foreign policy legacy that the antiwar protesters of the 1960s passed on to the rest of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. International affairs weren’t a matter of selecting among often cruel choices but of simply choosing sides. One of his critics condemned Kissinger for pursuing “endless war as a matter of course,” ignoring his Realist contention that there is “an irreducible element of power involved in international politics.” During the years of the Cold War, he insisted, American power was employed “to prevent Soviet military and political expansion,” explaining to a generation unable to see anything beyond Vietnam that “the Cold War was not a policy mistake—though some mistakes were of course made.” Vietnam had turned the attention of the left away from the realities of power to the sanctimonious realms of self-righteousness. But as Kissinger was to preach again and again: “So long as the post–Cold War generation of national leaders is embarrassed to elaborate an unapologetic concept of enlightened national interest, it will achieve progressive paralysis, not moral elevation.