Lynn Nottage Quotes

I don't see how I ever could have thought that having an all-white crew for a special about race would be OK.

I have never experienced racism in the feminist movement, so it concerned me to think that I was unable to see the subject clearly because I came from white, middle-class privilege.

I wanted people to begin dialogue about racism, about colorism. I wanted people to really become honest about our beliefs, about racism and how it exists in America today.

There are so many shows that are 'white,' and we wanted to talk about how two really delusional, cliche white girls handle racial issues.

For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we're good, moral people, we can't be racist - we don't engage in those acts.

The truth is, no, we don't live in a post-racial state anywhere in America, and this is particularly true in Hollywood.

My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.

I heard about the book and I said, 'Oh my god, I've got to read this book,' and I didn't know that a white woman wrote it. Nobody said that to me, they just said, 'The Help - Oh my god, you've got to read it.' Everyone failed to mention it was a white woman, I think, because nobody really wants to talk about race.

The diversity industry needs friction to survive, so it perpetually reworks the definition of racism.

Why is the world that I see around me mixed, and why is the world I see in movies filled with all white people? Why does it have to be like that?

When I was growing up, all these superheroes were white. On some level, you put that out of your mind... but as you get older, you realize it's a very one-sided affair. So I'm very glad to see that these movies are becoming more diversified.

Hollywood's racist.

People of African descent, most of us grew up accepting and loving Spider-Man. I still love Spider-Man. I still love the Incredible Hulk. I still have those characters that were white role models, superheroes, heroes - whatever you want to call it. You basically had no choice but to accept those.

I wish Americans understood that race is a social construct, even if we don't want it to be.

If you're white working with non-white people, you will be branded as a colonialist by some people, regardless of your efforts or intentions.

I grew up in Welwyn Garden City, and when you're a woman of colour in a predominantly white area, you become aware of prejudice from a young age.

I think #OscarsSoWhite is about there not truly being enough people of color represented.

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.

'Color-blind' comes up - people say 'Oh, I'm color-blind and therefore can't be accused of racism,' but I think that if we are going to have an honest dialogue about racism, we have to admit that people of color are having a different experience.

I like to look at it as things and people and whole society in general being uneducated about facts. There are a lot of stereotypes. But I don't see color, I don't see race.

This is what I have learned: Any white person living in the United States will develop opinions about race simply by swimming in the water of our culture. But mainstream sources - schools, textbooks, media - don't provide us with the multiple perspectives we need.

In Australia, there just weren't strong roles for actors of colour. I was often being asked to turn up for commercials with a ghetto blaster on my shoulder. I thought, 'Are we in the '60s?'

Everyone is so terrified of being labeled a racist.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong.