Terry McMillan Quotes

It's very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it's interpreted in some way.

It's funny because I went to a predominantly white school, but for some reason they always picked the musicals that were supposed to be done by totally black casts.

I come in with this rock 'n' roll-oriented music, and it's not black enough . . . I've always had to deal with this black-white thing.

I would say that I put down a lot of the white American culture, and ways, and beliefs.

You can usually tell when people aren't being authentic, but that goes for every artist, not just white artists.

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

I feel like a lot of the portrayals of, in particular, younger minority ethnic characters on television, a lot of their dialogue, a lot of their characteristics, a lot of their personality in a writer's eyes, is kind of propelled through their ethnicity.

'Black film,' unless it's lucky enough or creative enough, or timely enough to build a life of its own, hangs subjacent to 'white film' on Hollywood's financial score board... aided and abetted by the supposition that so-called black film has no foreign market.

When writing on black life, whites have often been unwelcome, usually called upon to give witness or hauled in as the accused.

Because when you have all white men in the writers' room trying to tell the perspective of cultural appropriation or what it's like to be black or Asian in America and not necessarily knowing what it's like, that's when everything gets mixed up.

We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that.

When white people wear baggy clothing and speak gibberish they're homeless, when black people wear baggy clothing and speak gibberish they're called rappers.

What happens to Black Folks today, happens to White Folks tomorrow.

And what happens a lot of times when - let's just speak specifically white and black - when white or black people feel misunderstood when it comes to talking about race, they immediately get defensive.

You are the antithesis of a racist if you're white and you want to be black and you go out and do everything you can to identify as black, how in the world can they condemn that? That's not fraud. That's good intentions. And as we know, as we've learned, we are supposed to examine the good intentions and not the nature of the evidence.

A rather honored guest of the Cuban government, so I wouldn't experience the problems. I think it would take a black Cuban to really articulate this because I'm being treated in a very generous way.

To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good. To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.

Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: "But it's only fiction, only entertainment."

Barack Obama's said some very nice things and he says them well. But if you ask me, the reason that we're looking at somebody who is such an inexperienced senator, who has said some very pleasant but not especially sterling or innovative things, the reason that he's considered such a big deal is simply because he's black.

I found it to be kind of ironic, because I’m white, therefore I’m appropriating culture, but then Eminem won it - who’s white and won it many times - and they didn’t seem to say anything about that. I suspect it was just because they dislike me.

Does he have a double standard for black critics as opposed to white critics?

You can have a film and have 200 white people working on it, and nobody finds anything wrong with that. But if you insist on having a black crew, all of a sudden there's something wrong.

Republican Party hasn't been black friendly over the many centuries in this country.

One of the ways [racism] pops up is when they turn a comic into a live-action movie and there's this temptation to make Asian characters white.

He [liberal white person] may stand with you through thin, but not thick; when the chips are down, you'll find that as fixed in him as his bone structure is his sometimes subconscious conviction that he's better than anybody black.