As a father of two black sons now, you ask yourself, 'What do I have to do to assure the safety of these boys?' It can be daunting.
In 2014, topics like Black Lives Matter, the Middle East, and Ebola were prominent in the national discussion, with mentions of then-President Barack Obama making up a relatively small slice of the discussion on news twitter.
I took one thing to heart that I heard from Sidney Poitier in 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.' And it resonated so much with me. He says: 'Dad, you always looked at yourself as a black man. I look at myself as a man.'
Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture.
I always wonder if my kids will say they're mixed or black.
I would love to do a Black Widow movie. That's perfect, I would love to do that. That character is really interesting: she doesn't have any superpowers; she just has extraordinary skills, and the world that she comes from, being this ex-K.G.B. assassin, I find that really fascinating, yeah.
If you are brown, black, Asian, or anything other than an English-speaking, highly-trained technician, the Republican Party doesn't want you here.
I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.
I grew up in L.A. in a school that was diverse, but it was not really integrated, so I didn't ever fully fit in with the black girls or the white girls or the Latina girls.
We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.
As it pertains to my black womanhood, there's just a lot of ground to cover. There's a lot of stuff to say.
I was fixated on Prince's 'Black Album' for a long time.
I have a massive phobia for schedules and calendars. I need people to tell me where I need to be. I can't bear to see it in black and white. I think it's a fear of being pinned down.
When I think about women of color and their place politically in the world and culture... they've had two layers of just garbage to overcome. To me, a black woman is a woman-woman.
It goes back in the black community that the police are not your friends. That's an old, old, deep understanding that we have, that it's going to take a lot to undo that in our minds.
For myself, if I'm trying to obtain a certain longevity in my career, to establish myself as a certain kind of star, I don't want that black exploitation image.
I like smudgy black eyes and pale lips for evening. Red lipstick looks great on other girls, but it's too much on me.
It's a bummer interracial love is still such a big deal. To me, it's quite normal. I grew up seeing couples that were interracial. Who cares if it's a black guy and white girl, or an Asian guy and white girl, etc.? Odds are, every combo exists out there somewhere so why not put it on the screen? Shouldn't art imitate life?
When I was younger, it was harder for me to find a black eyeliner that would actually show up on my skin. Being a dark-skinned woman, when you find something that actually shows up on your face, you love it even more.
'Orange Is the New Black' and 'Sense8' have enjoyed great success all over the world.
My home has to feel airy and bright with natural light. I don't switch on lamps until it is literally black outside.
A lot of the time, black people, we don't introduce ourselves as black.
In papergaming, players can look at a character sheet of their own creation and see all of their skills, right there, in black and white.
It's an ongoing joke that a black man is always the first one to get killed in movies.
I wrote 'Black Deutschland' very quickly one summer, probably because I had a lot of it in pieces and fragments sitting around over the years as false starts or notes.
Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics.
We have to create a range, and we have to let there be possibilities. And basically, by showing there are different types of people, you write down the monolith. You stop having to represent for all black people when you allow there to be different types represented.
When I was a teenager, my parents made me take a part-time job at the local Black Eyed Pea, which was a home-cooked-food family restaurant.
The media's image of us is as animals, and we were never that to me. I knew love from black folks.
I'd describe my look as girly-edgy. I like black nail polish and eyeliner, but I'll wear them with pink shoes.
I never go black tie. I never grew up wearing ties or bow ties or anything.
When I get 13 or 14 years old, I get crazy with rock music, like, like, deeply crazy. And one of my favorite bands at that moment was, for example, like - bands like Metallica or Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and Santana, you know? And then I start to play metal, actually, when I was - at the age of 15.
This nation is being divided into black and white, and the present system encourages this.
Initially, I used to cart coke from the West Melbourne Gasworks -12 tonne a day, 150-pound sacks. I'd come home looking like Al Jolson at the end of the day - white teeth, black face... A good hard day's work.
More black women are in the professional-managerial field, and they don't want to look like the guys sitting next to them in pinstriped suits.
A black man - I say a black man, we got no corner on the market, but every day in some form or fashion you got to prove you're a man. But you want to keep the life-and-death situations down. I can get beat. But there's getting beat and there's getting stomped.
