Quotes About Identity

Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.

As Afro-Latinas in the world, we are constantly negotiating others' assumptions about where our bodies and our memories overlap, where our Blackness/negritud begins and our Latina-ness end.

I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.

I don't want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.

I am not a f**king pleasure girl, damn you! I'm an officer!

I'm Irish!...When I feel well I feel better than anyone, when I am in pain I yell at the top of my lungs, and when I am dead I shall be deader than anybody.

Nobody truly knows me, but I suppose that's the way it is for everyone. Or at least I hope so. We seem to have the tendency to put on a front in the best interests of ourselves, but eventually these fronts weld themselves to us until we no longer recognize our own soul in the mirror.

Labels? Okay, fine. I'm bisensual. Heteroflexible. And life-curious. That about covers it.

We see things not as they are, we see them as WE are.

The problem is that this fluidity is not a choice we are free to make. Despite the unifying patriotic rhetoric that permeates the United States, on some level Americans are not really fooled: at bottom, each person knows he or she must continually "reinvent themselves," which is to say, go it alone. America is the ultimate anticommunity.3

It is also why there is so little tolerance for substantive dis- sent, or fundamental critique, in America. Since our identity is in fact quite brittle, we have to be constantly telling ourselves how fabulous we are.

they sometimes affirm his identity without understanding his individuality

I still don't belong to anyone - I am mine.

It would be a lot easier if each of us were related to someone of another color and if, eventually, we were all one color. In America, this can happen.

With guys I revere, like Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X, their look is less about style than purpose and the expression of beauty. It wasn't just about being noticed, you know?

I began to fear that Mos Def was being treated as a product, not a person, so I've been going by Yasiin since '99. At first it was just for friends and family, but now I'm declaring it openly.

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

Always remember, you are the best , because your character is the best.

The kind of ominous silence that comes while somebody quietly adjusts his view of who you are.

Every country has a legend. But in Uganda, everyone is a legend of their kind

Some of us are actually not that cute

Being blond is not a hair color, it's a lifestyle.

First name; mister. Middle name; dot. Last name; TEE.

Cricket is not everything, not by any means, but it is a large part of who I am.