Nate Parker Quotes

For me, being able to work with somebody who I don't have to translate my experience to all the time - that's important, because I'm not ­having to walk someone down the path of racial understanding to tell a story about a woman of color.

With theatre, we all agree to suspend our disbelief about so many things, but not about race. It's totally OK to have one actor playing five roles - people are willing to believe that. But they won't believe it if there's a black or an Asian kid who has white parents. What does that say about us?

There was all this talk when Obama got elected about how we were living in a postracial world. But we're not. Until we get to the point where James Earl Jones can play, say, George Washington, race matters. You wouldn't put a white actor in blackface to play Othello. You shouldn't have a white actor in what amounts to yellowface to play Asian.

There has been a big debate about it: can a black man play a Nordic character?

I've never excluded myself because of color. It's never been part of the radar, when I look at anything I do. The majority of the roles that I've played have had very little to do with being black. It doesn't matter what color you are.

It's so important to create roles and characters and projects that feature black people in a way that's not specifically targeted towards the niche market, which is, like, a black movie is created, and it's produced and pitched so that only black people will watch it.

I think that a lot of actors of color have said that it's a wonderful thing to play a role that doesn't have a race and that is kind of open to any sort of interpretation. I completely understand that, but at the same time, I just want Asian characters that are well-written.

When you cast cross-racially, another dimension is added.

Blacks are tired of seeing whites saying, 'I understand you.' You need a black to direct a black film.

Shonda Rhimes has figured it out, of getting multiracial casts on television and appealing to everybody.

Why aren't there films being made that tell ethnically diverse stories? Or why is it so impossible to allow a person of color to add their texture and their essence to a role that is not ethnically specific? I don't know why it's a novel or risky idea to consider making a film look like how our world actually looks today.

One of the things I'm concerned about is that I really want to make sure the races of all the characters are kept. I don't like it when black characters become white in movies, or things like that.

I've always wanted to explore characters of all races, all genders, all ages. It just seems to me to be a natural way to approach any kind of storytelling.

You've seen every single race besmirched, but you never saw an unfavorable image of a kike because the Jews are ever watchful for that. They never allowed it to be shown on the screen!

I don't look at people and see color and race. I see inside.

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.

I read that Hollywood wanted to film Fences years ago with a white director, but [August] Wilson refused. He thought that the director needed to have lived the culture of black Americans.

I'm asking you not to be color blind, but to be color brave.

What I do feel with the different scripts that they give me where I feel like this is done for one of those reasons, I share my point of view. I don't just say, "No, thank you." I say, "I feel that this represents Latinos in a wrong way, in a bad way."

People are so sensitive about race that they can't hear someone speaking about their life in a very true way, or doing satire or political parody.

Such compositions, line and color ideas, such wonders come into my mind and have stuck! - They will this time be dismissed only by being painted out.

God so loved the world that he made up his mind to damn a large majority of the human race.

Money is color-blind, race-blind, sex-blind, degree-blind, and couldn't care less who brought you up or in what circumstances.

I often have a theme in mind when I'm starting. I know that I want everything to be in a world of, say, evolution, or guilt.