Most of all, I dislike this idea nowadays that if you’re a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I’ve visited Africa, and I’ve got news for everyone: I’m not an African.
The Jewish culture has a wonderful thing about education. It has a great thing about family; it has a great thing about unity, hard work, dedication. I would like to say the African-American community should emulate that.
A lot of these things in this world were only a dream for Martin Luther King. Not a one-term, but a two-term African-American president. And this is a terrible country? That was a dream for Martin Luther King.
Getting into the banjo and discovering that it was an African-American instrument, it totally turned on its head my idea of American music – and then, through that, American history.
I think people love the character of Iris West. I think a lot of fans are also excited that Iris West is now African-American. They want to see her be strong and intelligent and a love interest – and so people come out in full force to defend that and honor that. And I think that’s cool.
We had particular policies in this country that resulted in the larger share of poverty that we have in African-American communities.
King had come to Memphis to lend his moral authority to the struggle of striking municipal sanitation workers who were overwhelmingly African-American. They earned poverty wages, endured degrading working conditions, and faced brutal beatings when they tried to organize.
My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the ’70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria.
Anyone reading contemporary poetry – especially contemporary African-American poetry – will quickly see that race is an enduring subject. What some don’t realize is just how diverse the handling of that subject is. It’s as diverse as blackness.
If an African-American or a recent immigrant – or anyone else, for that matter – can’t feel secure walking into a police station or up to a police officer to report a crime, because of a fear that they’re not going to be treated well, then everything else that we promise is on a shaky foundation.
We need to have law enforcement and the African-American community work together for the safety of everybody.
In 1968 when I was in high school I built a four-foot-tall remote control robot with pneumatic cylinders that operated his hands. My robot won first place at a science competition at the University of Alabama where my high school was the only African-American school represented. That was a huge moral victory.
In 2008, Barack Obama had all the wind at his back, everything going for him. He was an African-American at a time when the country was eager to do that. The Republicans had, in the view of many of us, pretty much disgraced themselves at home and abroad for eight years.
I went through a soul-searching period. I went to a place that was a little bit more reflective and dark. I began to look at who I am, who I was, where I come from, what my culture is, and who I am as an African-American person in America.
If you want a president who will make things better in the African-American community, you are looking at him. You take a look!
Unfortunately, in television today there are very few African-American characters who are human beings. They are typically two-dimensional stereotypes, cookie-cutter types.
Woodie King Jr., in 1970, had started a company called the New Federal Theatre, which was ensconced at the Henry Street Settlement. I did a number of plays there, and I auditioned each time. The plays were mostly new. New York was very fertile ground; there was a plethora of African-American plays being done.
I think that seeing as much support as somebody like Obama as a black candidate running for president in a country that historically has had issues with the African-American people, and them having issues vice-versa, is a miraculous thing.
I have always drawn strength from my late mother’s life. When Eunice Johnson set up the first major fashion show for African-American audiences more than 50 years ago, she did so at a time when black Americans, especially black women, were still fighting for a seat at the table – any table.
In ’08, Barrack Obama was famously elected president. Even though I’d supported McCain and dreaded what I feared Barrack might do, I felt a surge of elation when the networks announced he’d won. I really hadn’t thought the U.S. would go for an African-American for a decade or so.
The African-American experience is one of the most important threads in the American tapestry.
Within a lot of African-American households, I think, there’s an idea that black men don’t want to take an active participation in the lives of their children. That if they do, there has to be some sort of ulterior motive.
Her continuity – you know, if you connect Harriet Tubman, who died in 1913, to Rosa Parks, born in 1913, you get this extraordinary spectrum of the African-American experience.
Out of 30 years of Second City I was probably the third African-American with the main stage cast. I was surprised when I first heard that. I think part of the reason that improvisation has never been popular with African-Americans is that it isn’t popular in the inner cities.
Funny enough though, despite what Donald Trump has to say and the way African-American people are portrayed so often in media, African-American people can have a leaning to be very conservative.
One of the things that’s really, really present in ‘Between the World and Me’ is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition.
I didn’t mind being in a school with a small African-American population. The African-American-community was very tight, and that was great. But I also wanted to interact with other types of folks.
The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they’re not gone.
I never saw a little African-American girl saving the world. So to be able to be that for not only myself but girls who look like me is really important and inspiring. Unfortunately, we don’t see ourselves saving the world a lot, and if we do see any type of superhero, that person usually has superpowers.
The ‘West Wing’ writers room would not have come up with the idea of running a presidential campaign in which an African-American gets elected. Because the realism view would have said that’s not possible.
Anyone who watches a lot of television, or listens to pop music, is familiar with a certain vision of America. If not exactly colorblind, this America is one in which different races easily interact, in which a white person might have an Asian boss, Hispanic stepson, or African-American frenemy.
I’m tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro – that’s the Scotch-Irish part.
Too often, if you look back through the history of representation and you take the work of African-American artists, the work is on such a modest scale that it becomes sort of inconsequential.
In 1900, 180-plus out of every 1,000 African-American babies died.
I don’t want to sit there and compare to things I’ve gone through to what the Black player, the African-American player, goes through.
My first novel, ‘Leaving Atlanta,’ took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.
My company, Cinema Gypsy, produced a podcast, ‘Bronzeville,’ in conjunction with Larenz Tate and his brothers that we’re developing into a television show. It deals with a very tight-knit African-American community in Chicago in 1947 and people who run a numbers wheel.
The history of African-American repression in this country rose from government-sanctioned racism. Jim Crow laws were a product of bigoted state and local governments.
I think music is one of the hero/sheroes of the African-American existence.
I got a bronze medal and I can’t complain about that, the only African-American to get a medal in the Winter Olympics.
How can we bridge the gap between… African-American males and white cops?
I loved the African-American culture, but racism was still a big problem and white America was exactly what I didn’t love.
We have to build that African-American offensive coordinator/quarterback coach that is going to be a head coach. I think that’s our job as head coaches – to find those guys.
African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures.
I don’t live my life as a writer. I’m a mother, an African-American woman, and I do everything that everybody else does – cook and a little bit of cleaning.
I think most people write from what they see in their own world, which is maybe why we so often see an African-American woman as the best friend, or the one you bring in when you need some sass. It’s like we’re put in a box.
When people see Barack Obama, they don’t necessarily see an African-American president. They see someone who is a child of immigrants. They see someone whose family has worked hard and struggled. And they see many similarities between themselves and Barack Obama.
