Lena Waithe Quotes

One of my personal plights in this business is about playing 'The Sassy Black Girl.'

I don't see myself as a 'black actor,' I'm just Shemar Moore the actor.

There remains a degree of anti-black intellectualism in entertainment. Middle and upper-middle class blacks have often been portrayed as buffoons in popular culture; witness the characters of Carlton Banks on 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' and Braxton P. Hartnabrig on 'The Jamie Foxx Show.'

What does it mean to be too black for Hollywood? It's self-explanatory. Hollywood has certain kinds of blacks that they like.

Where are the exhortations for children to reject the self-defeating stereotypes that reduce black people to violent, oversexed 'gangstas,' minstrel show comedians and mindless athletes?

My 'Black Panther' run really wasn't about Black Panther. It was about Ross. It was about exploding myths about black superheroes, black characters, and black people, targeted specifically at a white, male-dominated retailer base.

In the publishing sense, 'urban fantasy' does not mean 'black,' and that's pretty ironic, considering that it's a euphemism everywhere else. It would be great to get that back.

I've been asked far too often, 'Can you be blacker?' I've gotten done with auditions and heard, 'We're not going to go black with this character.'

It's always baffled me why BET looks the way it does. This is Black Entertainment Television. Why are we up there, then, looking like idiots? It's because black people are marketing black people like that.

The white imagination is sure something when it comes to blacks.

Lazy reviewers look up other people's reviews and they write the same thing, so you get people writing crap based on crap.

We are now the proud owners of a white boy. Now we have to shop in the caucasian isle and get sunscreen, mayonaise and mild salsa because the other ones really hawt!

Today's Uncle Tom doesn't wear a handkerchief on his head. This modern, twentieth-century Uncle Thomas now often wears a top hat. He's usually well-dressed and well-educated. He's often the personification of culture and refinement. The twentieth-century Uncle Thomas sometimes speaks with a Yale or Harvard accent. Sometimes he is known as Professor, Doctor, Judge, and Reverend, even Right Reverend Doctor. This twentieth-century Uncle Thomas is a professional Negro -by that I mean his profession is being a Negro for the white man.

Constance L. Rice, co-director of the Los Angeles of the Advancement Project, told the Times that Seltzer might have been influenced by David Simon's fake ghetto series, "The Wire." It figures. Isn't this sexism? Isn't this a double standard? They're hard on this young woman for her fake ghetto book, yet praise these White guys for theirs. So there's a big market in downing Black men.

Golf is one of the few sports where a white man can dress like a black pimp and not look bad.

When I first saw a White Dutch person dressed up as Black Pete, I was both sickened and shocked. It's hard to stand next to someone who views your skin color and hair as a costume. As a filmmaker, whenever I get that feeling, I want to explore what motivates people to engage in such offensive behavior and enlighten folks about its origins.

Certainly, black horror movie fans have, you know, been particularly vocal. I mean, there's the whole Eddie Murphy routine about, you know, black people in a horror movie wouldn't last very long. Right? They just walk in - you hear get out. Too bad we can't stay, baby.

I was raised to believe that you had to do things better than white people in order to succeed. The old black shows were better than the white shows. "The Jeffersons" (1975) was a lot better. "Good Times" (1974) was way funnier. "Sanford and Son" (1972). Now, though, everyone thinks we're equal, so we submit the same shit that everyone else submits. And then we get mad when they won't air it. You got to go back to the old attitude of it has to be twice as good.

The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

That value system has been handed right down in European society. And today when you find Negroes, if they even look like they're adopting these so-called middle-class values, standards, it's not that they are taking something from the white man, but they are probably identifying again with the level or standard that these same whites have gotten from them back during that period.

I don't like perpetuating the stereotype of black males being drug dealers, and criminals.

I mean, it makes me sick when I see a white man sitting there smiling at me being entertaining, man. When I know what he's gonna do after he gets through. You know, when you see that thing on their face - like: "Entertain me." You know what I mean? Even the black guy that's trying to be white - even he can have that crap on his face.

Well, there were definitely elements of my rise in radio that had to do with my being black. But going back as far as Walter Winchell, Army Archerd and Hedda Hopper, legendary wags would grab a radio microphone and talk about what Errol Flynn and other stars were up to.

There's a million white people better qualified than a black man to be president of America.

Bill Clinton is like a lot of white politicians. They eat soul food, they party with black women, they play the saxophone, but when it comes to domestic and foreign policy, they make the same decisions that are destructive to African people in this country and throughout the world.