Tony Kushner Quotes

In the locker room, and when I'm with my friends, we use racial slurs... What I do with my black friends is not up to white America to dictate to me what's appropriate and inappropriate.

Awards shows are being pushed to shed their genteel limousine liberalism and embrace the race-gender-sexual identity agenda in full.

The fashion industry is an immense cultural and social blight that only gets a free pass because its would-be detractors are scared it'll start criticising their haircut.

As a white queer person of a certain degree of economic privilege, I think that my ability to pass as straight is a privilege that other folk I know don't have. It's important to keep in mind who really is in the most trouble and to direct our attention to assisting those people.

Something that happens to me is that I'll write a play specifically from my own experience, and then I'll inevitably be told that I'm being tunnel-visioned about it. People always ask, 'What about that other race? Or discrimination toward those people?'

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

White middle- and upper-class men have a longer journey to go than many people.

Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other. A different dynamic it seems to me is at work in the critique of new sexuality studies.

If you are going to call a film a 'black film' then you have to make a film that represents everyone that's black, which is almost impossible. That is why white films are not called white films, they are just called 'films.'

About the time I was 7, I got really into black-exploitation films, so I made my own Wonder Woman, but I made her black.

Mr. Cosby wanted to do a show not about an upper-middle-class black family, but an upper-middle-class family that happened to be black. Though it sounds like semantics, they're very different approaches.

It's understandable why TV hasn't been diverse because a lot of TV writers are white dudes from Harvard. And white dudes from Harvard aren't going to immediately want to write about trans issues. They're not immediately going to want to write about a Filipino family.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species.

The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.

We receive from America the right to vote as Americans, for America's weal, and if we cannot use our privilege as Americans we should surrender it.

To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist.

Democracy requires breeding. These illiterate peasants certainly know less about running a country than I do.

The elite interests must not crowd out the interests of the citizens.

The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others”, and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through the those gates.

Freedom for woman … can only be freedom for the middle-class woman … Socialism and feminism if they can be parallel social tendencies, cannot be one cause.

My grandparents were wealthy; my mom was not. I would walk into these worlds of privilege and then walk back into this other world. My little brother is biracial. So race and economic class and sexuality - these were always issues that were a part of my life.

My first series, the 'Inheritance' trilogy, in the first book, you were dealing with a woman of color from an impoverished culture, being brought up among wealthy, privileged white people and having to cope and perform in ways that she has not been raised to do, and that was obviously drawn from some personal experiences.

I think it was a good and necessary thing that the American upper class diversified, and that more African-Americans and Jews and Catholics (like myself) and women now share privileges and powers once reserved for Protestant white men.

For all of the diversity in 'Scandal,' no one else would be sitting in a room wearing a T-shirt and chains and call a Southern white Republican president a 'boy.' And it's those kinds of things that Rowan has the freedom to say that nobody else could say within the confines of the show.