Jamaica Kincaid Black Quotations

People only say I'm angry because I'm black and I'm a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do.

It's very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it's interpreted in some way.

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

A piece of cloth that is called "linen" has more validity than calling you and me "black" or "negro." "Cotton" has more validity as cotton than yours and my being "black."

"Race." I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both "black" and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can't take them seriously.

In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, "You know, what you did was incredibly wrong."

I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me!

I'm writing out of desperation. I felt compelled to write to make sense of it to myself - so I don't end up saying peculiar things like 'I'm black and I'm proud.' I write so I don't end up as a set of slogans and clichés.

People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman.