I’m just happy that as an African-American man, that ‘Candyman’ has once again been given the nod to enter people’s consciousness.
All Blaxploitation is, is the opportunity for an African-American cast or lead actor or actress to do the same things that a white action hero gets to do.
People have assumed that I have to run the ball before I can throw it most all of my career, all the way back before high school. It’s a stereotype put on me for a long time because I’m African-American, and I’m a dual-threat quarterback.
The reason why I began making quilts is because I wrote my autobiography in 1980 and couldn’t get it published because I wanted to tell my story, and my story didn’t appear to be appropriate for African-American women.
There are some policemen who overuse force, especially when there’s an African-American involved, regardless of age.
More than 72 percent of children in the African-American community are born out of wedlock. That means absent fathers.
My goal is to broaden and deepen the range of African-American characters on television, so I always try to show human beings.
In popular culture, there is this notion that African-American men and women can’t get together, and we’re having these issues. I think it’s an American problem because I know a lot of white women and men who are having just as many issues trying to find ‘that person’ as anyone.
Warren Moon and Doug Williams really didn’t run that much. That’s the negative stereotype when it comes to African-American quarterbacks, that most of us just run. Those guys threw it around. I like to think I can throw it around a little bit.
I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-’90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility – no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading.
Look – I’m an African-American. I’m black. But I’m just looking at the character and trying to find his soul, his energy. If you can wipe away the blanket of skin and flesh that people tend to see, and look inside for the essence of the soul, then that’s the work I’m doing. That’s the work I always do.
I think at places like ‘Slate’ or the magazine where I work, there was a really poor record of hiring African-American writers. It was really that simple. And I think with the proliferation of the Internet and Internet media, it has been a little harder to maintain that gatekeeper position.
I was taught from a young age that many people would treat me as a second-class citizen because I was African-American and because I was female.
I do not make any apologies for my manner or personality. I come from a long line of very strong, black African-American women who neither bend nor bow. I haven’t had very good modeling in submission.
I think, though, as African-American women, we are always trained to value our community even at the expense of ourselves, and so we attempt to protect the African-American community.
It was important for me to join the White House because as I looked around Trump’s inner circle and campaign, there were not a lot of African-Americans, particularly African-American women, uniquely positioned to serve as a member of the senior staff, to serve as an assistant to the president.
I try to find the core values that are so fundamental that they transcend ethnic identity. That doesn’t mean I run from it. I embrace African-American culture and I love it and embrace it, but it is a part of a human identity. So I’m always trying to make a larger human statement.
As an African-American, as a woman, I think that I’ve been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down, never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important.
I think that James Baldwin is, for sure, one of the most important American writer/thinkers of his time… not just African-American. He singled-handedly revolutionized the political, artistic, and historical discourses about America.
We can’t all work in the inner city. And, I don’t even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It’s just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.
We’re African-American and we work together as a family, so people assume we’re like the Jacksons. But I didn’t have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.
If the only thing that was interesting about Jefferson Pierce is that he is African-American, I don’t think we’d have much of a show.
My mother is an African-American from the South Side of Chicago who married a white guy in 1978. She was hyperaware of racism and made me aware of that.
African-American music tends to have, at the very least, a glimmer of hope to it – sometimes full-fledged hope.
What basketball expresses is what jazz expresses. Certain cultural predispositions to make art. All African-American art has a substratum, or baseline, of improvisation and spontaneity. You find that in both basketball and jazz.
It’s an honor to be a part of Magic Shave as their new ambassador. One of the problems that some African-American men have with shaving is razor bumps. Magic Shave is perfect because once you eliminate the razor, you eliminate the bumps, and it’s so easy to use.
My understanding of racial discrimination as a child was highly distorted because the most prominent man in Archery was an African-American bishop. When he came home from up north, where he was in charge of A.M.E. churches in five states, it was front-page news. He was the most successful man in my life.
There are so many people that don’t come in contact with black men. Whether they live in a homogeneous area that’s mostly white or whether they live in places where they don’t have to come in contact with them. So what kind of contact do they have with African-American males? They have the media, and that’s it.
Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example, writers of slave narratives tend to lose their individual voices, as they were expected to stand in for all other voices, which were absent.
Sometimes you can’t fight change, because you’re a part of it, and I feel that in the context of these films that are happening now, there is a kind of change coming in terms of how history is represented on film, and the African, and the African-American and British African experience.
It’s unfortunate that a lot of people think African-American female artists are monolithically R&B this-or-that, don’t have to do anything by default.
I am committed to ensure that our 2008 Republican presidential candidates forthrightly address issues of importance to the African-American community.
A young girl reached out to me to be her mentor one day, which I didn’t really know anything about. What I did remember was what it was to be alone as an African-American dancer in the ballet world and wanting to connect with someone who looks like me.
I guess probably in my time in politics, it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community, despite being subscription television’s most valuable customers, they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options.
I don’t really identify myself as white or African-American. I’m just me. I’m Madison.
The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn’t really have that present in my house.
Being black, I’m involved in the reparations movement. It’s focused toward the African-American audience. We could begin to heal.
My parents would watch movies like ‘Big’ and ‘Freaky Friday,’ and I wanted to see that kind of story told from an African-American angle. So I had the idea for ‘Little,’ and then I told my parents, and we all fleshed it out together.
Every African-American I know has two faces. There’s the face that we have for ourselves and the face we put on for white America for the places we have to get to.
There aren’t a lot of African-American superheroes. I’ve been reading comics since I was eight or nine years old. Luke Cage stood out.
I am an African-American woman of dark skin tone, and there are very specific roles that are usually given to African-American women of a darker hue. Let’s start with ‘Once on This Island’: peasant girl. Let’s go to ‘The Color Purple’: young girl, beaten. Let’s go to ‘Ragtime’: Her baby’s taken.
As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime or even in their children’s lifetime or even in their grandchildren’s lifetime. So fatalism isn’t really an option.
A lot of people in the African-American community are raised by grandmothers, and that relationship is a special bond and circle.
Many African-American men are incarcerated. And so African-American women do carry an enormous burden. And traditionally have carried a greater burden than perhaps their white counterparts.
Years ago, I couldn’t get arrested in commercials because of my look: ‘Is he Jewish, Hispanic, or African-American?’ I ended up doing voiceover work, which has been great. Honestly, I can’t complain.
