A black actor is perfect for 'Kojak.'
My mother was the only girl in the family. One brother was District Attorney of Odessa or something; another was teaching classical languages; another was a captain of a battleship of the Black Navy; and still another was a chemist and icthyologist.
The first thing I bought that was really stylish was in 1969 when I was eleven. I saved up for a black, grey and white tie-dye grandad vest. It was too big - they weren't catering for kids my age - and hung off me, but I loved it.
I grew up in a largely black community during the '70s and '80s that scoffed at 'white' music. That music - folk, rock, some disco - was considered soulless, aberrant, just one more example of the Caucasian's desire to scream and yell and demand whatever their privilege and perpetual adolescence dictated they should demand.
My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.
Growing up as a young black girl in Potomac, Maryland was easy. I had a Rainbow Coalition of friends of all ethnicities, and we would carelessly skip around our elementary school like the powerless version of Captain Planet's Planeteers.
Color television! Bah, I won't believe it until I see it in black and white.
My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.
Right now, black female artists are the most interesting people to think about. People are ready to hear whatever we're gonna say, and I'm not scared to say anything.
America has a black president, but there are no black studio heads, and there just aren't that many black people working anywhere on film sets, let alone in positions of power in Hollywood. That's what needs to change.
Kaizad Gustad is quite crazy, and he has weird ideas, and 'Boom' is one such idea. It's a crazy film by a crazy guy. It's almost a satire, a black comedy.
It's always extremities when you are a young black male dealing with law enforcement.
Gold looks good on my skin, and gold looks good on black people, I think.
I'm just a black hole for stuff. No one should ever hand me anything, because I get so easily distracted. I'll be like, 'Oh, look, something shiny!' I'm glad I never learned how to drive. I would be really dangerous.
In my wildest imagination, I never thought that the fifth of six children born to Helen and Buddy Watts - in a poor black neighborhood, in the poor rural community of Eufaula, Oklahoma - would someday be called Congressman.
Just simple things - I like black and white, monochrome; I like suits.
Black Bolt is typically a stoic leader, part of a larger cast of Inhumans who get their hands dirty in ways that he doesn't.
The idea of an e-book has been around since the late 1970s, when researchers at Xerox PARC got on the case. Their prototype used millions of little magnetic particles, black on one side and white on the other, loosely embedded in the surface of a soft sheet of rubber.
From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.
I've hidden behind my hair more than clothes. Sometimes having long hair with a fringe is very useful when you don't want to look at people. I used to have very short hair, but long hair is my thing - a black nocturnal shield.
I think people assume that because I talk the way that I talk that I grew up with money, and then I've had to say, 'No, I grew up poor.' And then I was like, 'Why do I have to play this game where the only black experience that's authentic is the one where you grew up in poverty?' I mean, it's ridiculous.
First black Bond - that's my aim! That's the one!
I guess I have kind of a type. Pretty much anybody who shows up in a black leather overcoat, I've doubled for them.
That's one of the problems with Hollywood. It'll say 'policeman,' and an unless it says 'black policeman,' a lot of times you won't even get the opportunity to read for it, which is kind of crazy, but that's the way it is.
I'm so black, I leave fingerprints on coal.
Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs... I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.
The whole thing about 'progressive R&B' blows my mind. Black music has always been progressive.
There are so many stereotypes of how you have to be as a black man, growing up in the community as a man.
Pubs would be number one. And black cabs and cabbies - moody cabbies always crack me up. And the other thing I love is the parks: the parks around London don't get enough airtime - I think they're sensational, and when spring hits, the first thing I'll do is go to the park.
We are not inferring design to account for a black box, but to account for an open box.
Abortion and racism are evil twins, born of the same lie. Where racism now hides its face in public, abortion is accomplishing the goals of which racism only once dreamed. Together, abortionists are destroying humanity at large and the black community in particular.
Obama sees himself as such a huge change that he can be cautious about other societal changes. But what he doesn't realize is that legalizing gay marriage is like electing a black president. Before you do it, it seems inconceivable. Once it's done, you can't remember what all the fuss was about.
Black people lived right by the railroad tracks, and the train would shake their houses at night. I would hear it as a boy, and I thought: I'm gonna make a song that sounds like that.
It was a big thing for me to read black writers. 'Fences,' by August Wilson. James Baldwin's 'Amen Corner.' 'The Fire Next Time.' 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' of course.
I would never know how good I was if I didn't have Bob Arum. Bob Arum is white, Jewish; He was working for prosecutor's office. I'm black, an ex-convict, ex-number runner. Who would be most likely to succeed? It would be Bob 100-1. Yet I beat Bob on everything we ever done, with love.
People don't want rap to be anything other than it is. But genres expand. My contributions, no matter how they sound, will always be rap, because they'll always be black.
