A Quote by David Shields

Are black people conscious of how excruciatingly self-conscious white people have become in their every interaction with black people? Is this self-consciousness an improvement? Maybe not, because I'm thinking of people in categories rather than as people, which is a famously dangerous thing to do.
I've never seen a sincere white man, not when it comes to helping black people. Usually things like this are done by white people to benefit themselves. The white man's primary interest is not to elevate the thinking of black people, or to waken black people, or white people either. The white man is interested in the black man only to the extent that the black man is of use to him. The white man's interest is to make money, to exploit.
A lot of racism going on in the world right now. Who's more racist? Black people or white people? Black people. You know why? 'Cuz we hate black people too! Everything white people don't like about black people, black people really don't like about black people.
If you're up there [on stage] thinking about what you're doing, you're just not there and it's not going to happen.So trying to learn how to overcome those - which is a normal thing to do. You're in front of a lot of people. People are going to get very self-conscious. So you have to learn to sort of overcome that tendency towards self-consciousness and just blow it wide open. And you jump in and join all those people that are out there enjoying what you're doing together.
As a black person on the outside, because there's so much black art and so much of black people's work circulating, so many people imitating what black people do, you would think that there'd be more black people on the business side. It didn't cross my mind that every label head, for the most part, is a white guy.
Culture, as Indian people understood it, was basically a lifestyle by which a people acted. It was self-expression, but not a conscious self-expression. Rather, it was an expression of the essence of a people.
I think that many black people thought this would be a wonderful and extraordinary thing, for a black family to occupy the White House. Not only black people; a lot of white people thought that, too, but particularly black people.
What Black Consciousness seeks to do is to produce real black people who do not regard themselves as appendages to white society. We do not need to apologise for this because it is true that the white systems have produced through the world a number of people who are not aware that they too are people.
The black masses want not to be shrunk from as though they are plague-ridden. They want not to be walled up in slums, in the ghettos, like animals. They want to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men, and women! Few white people realize that many black people today dislike and avoid spending more time than they must about white people. This 'integration' image, as it is popularly interpreted, has millions of vain, self-exalted white people convinced that black people want to sleep in bed with them - and that's a lie!
Unfortunately, as I tell my white friends, we, as black people, we're never going to be successful - not because of you white people but because of other black people. When you're black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people.
Even people who say that black people are minorities, there are a billion black people in the world. A billion white people. What part of that is a minority? If you separate yourself, then maybe. But I see black people as one man. When I see people beaten on the streets of America, that hurts me. I feel that.
A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.
I just like watching people who really are not self-conscious, who aren't aware, because I fear that one could become too self-conscious, too artful, as an actor. Sometimes if you look at somebody, you can extrapolate from their exterior what might be happening in their interior. I'm nosy.
Many people become self-conscious when they communicate. Whether it's writing or speaking, they are consumed by anxiety. Self-consciousness is an impediment to what is required to serve an audience effectively. One's goal must be to achieve audience consciousness. To put oneself in their place, to recognize that the value of any communication arises from how it is received by them, not by what it means to the author. Rather than learning a multiplicity of rules for speaking, for example, I would suggest that a focus on serving one's audience will simplify and clarify everything.
Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best.
Black people come in so many different bodies, genders, and sexualities, so it's important that we're conscious of that so we can fight for a world that embraces and uplifts black people of every kind. Our voices are powerful and have the ability to make change.
White people's fear of Black people with guns will never cease to amaze me. Probably it's because they think about what they would do were they in our place. Especially the police, who have done so much dirt to Black people - their guilty conscience tells them to be afraid. When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.
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