American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen. – Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992

[W]e are the heirs of a past of rope, fire, and murder. I for one am not ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. – Booker T. Washington