Zoe Kravitz Quotes

I personally don't enjoy films that bring black people down. I find that a majority of the films that black people are starred in nowadays, are ones focused on gang violence or dancing.

I cannot imagine where we would have been without BET. Many like me who operate in black America can only get our balanced story told nationally on BET talk shows.

I don't think there's enough breadth to the stories told about African-Americans.

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.'

If you're going to make black movies only about black people, that's as bad as white movies only about white people.

I'm tired of cookie-cutter monolithic representation of black folks.

For me, whenever I would see a lot of 'black films,' I didn't feel represented in it. I didn't feel connected to the characters or the situations or the humor.

There's this responsibility you feel to present a certain thing that kind of respectability politics. I think that became the only accepted way of defining black culture. I started to become too aware of 'How does this look?' instead of 'Who are these characters?'

I just feel in a lot of ways black people are so much looser and cooler. Just as a culture, it's so much more real.

One of the reasons that the African American actors wanted to be a part of the show was because these people are talking to each other the way that African American people talk to each other, and they said that they didn't see that on TV.

Black and awkward is the worst, because black people are stereotyped as being anything but awkward in mainstream media... Black people are always portrayed to be cool or overly dramatic, anything but awkward.

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

'Black film,' that term allows studios to just marginalize a movie and say, 'We've made our black film. We've made our film with people of color in it,' as opposed to, 'I just feel like people of color should be in every genre.'

When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like 'Bird,' I use 90% black people.

What is blackness? Is it the way you talk? Do you got to say, 'Dey this, dey dat.' Or the way you dress? Or is it the forgiving of certain things? What is black enough?

The fact that we are playing Latinos does not mean that you have to be shouting 'fiesta,' 'taco,' or talking in the same way most Latin characters do in American television.

Why do we always have to see black people in hindsight? Why are the Hollywood movies always historical? What about the contemporary image of black people?

We're not monolithic. What is blackness? To me, how do you define that?

Some of white middle America haven't seen a black gay guy in a music video before.

Just because we finally have a Latino family on TV doesn't mean we're up there to lecture people about what it means to be Latino.

If Adam Sandler does a bad movie, he doesn't bring down the whole white race. But if Tyler Perry does, it's like, 'See what you guys do?' and that type of thing.

Usually when you're Asian and you're on set, you're the only Asian there. Either you're the token Asian or you're the Asian sidekick.

Kanye West does not represent all black people.

I think, all too often, this society has too monolithic a definition of what a black American is.

I wish there was more for minorities than sitcoms. I'd like to see a soap opera about blacks. People don't live in isolation anymore.