Roger Ross Williams Quotes

People are tired of mainstream media's limited and confined portrayal of people of color.

It really fascinates me what white people are allowed to write about.

Every year, Hollywood is looking for that new, white leading man and new white starlet that audiences fall in love with. But they're not looking for the next Denzel Washington, Will Smith or Sidney Poitier.

Since anti-racist individuals did not control mass media, the media became the primary tool that would be used and is still used to convince black viewers, and everyone else, of black inferiority.

Rock 'n' roll is much easier if you're white.

I am performing this role of the artist and this role of the 'negress' coming into a white-box institution. It's kind of a self-appointed role: the self-designated negress.

I think that, by and large, the predominant voice we hear in rock music is a white male voice.

I loved films like 'When Harry Met Sally' and 'Annie Hall,' but these were very specific, white Manhattan experiences. You don't see a single person of color anywhere, but somehow these films are universal. As a filmmaker and creator, I was frustrated with that idea.

I feel like I'm put in a position where I have to engage with what people bring to my work, which is an expectation for me to talk about race because it's not normal for a black writer to be writing in the theatre.

While the documentary community is way ahead of Hollywood, it is still nowhere near where it needs to be. Filmmakers of color rarely get hired by the powerful production companies, and they are not getting supported enough by broadcasters and funders to tell their own stories.

Basically, the system works to my disadvantage for no other reason than that I am a person of color, and I am telling stories about people of color.

As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.

Sometimes people of color walk into these spaces that are dominated by the dominant culture, and we have to be better, not make as much trouble.

White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it.

A lot of things that I can't get into the room for, even just to be seen, is because they're just saying 'No. they're not casting non-white.' You're lumped into a category with people who are just not white.

I think that if we really want to break it down, that non-black filmmakers have had many, many years and many, many opportunities to tell many, many stories about themselves, and black filmmakers have not had as many years, as many opportunities, as many films to explore the nuances of our reality.

A major problem for Black women, and all people of color, when we are challenged to oppose anti-Semitism, is our profound scepticism that white people can actually be oppressed.

Have the colored people done anything to justify the prejudice against them that does exist in the hearts of so many white persons and, generally, of one great political party in this country? Have they done anything to justify it? No, sir.

It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.

There are many projects I couldn't get off the ground because they didn't have white heroes. It's a problem that everyone who's been working in Hollywood has been facing.

It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.

So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.

It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind.

People of color have a constant frustration of not being represented, or being misrepresented, and these images go around the world.

It takes time for brown people and people of different ethnicities to get into the Hollywood world, which is predominantly Caucasian and African American.