Lena Waithe Quotes

As an Italian-American, I have a special responsibility to be sensitive to ethnic stereotypes.

Personally, it's a comfort and happiness to know that my work is taken seriously and is not marginalised and put in a box of ethnic immigrant writing in America.

I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.

I don't buy into the idea that an Irish writer should write about Ireland, or a gay writer should write about being gay.

We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'

It's hard in America as a writer of color, an actor of color, not to get caught up in race and culture. But you're also supposed to be able to write characters and scenes in a way where it's just a matter of fact, a component.

There are plenty of Latina actresses that no one's ever heard of... Some are really brown, some are light-skinned, and some look like they're Caucasian, but it's like we only want to identify with a certain kind of look and celebrate that under the guise that this is a 'Latina actress.'

I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.

When you're part of a society where you're constantly having to define your identity and sort of negotiate with what the mainstream culture thinks you are, you have less energy and time to figure out who you are when you go home at night.

Any show that speaks to people of color feels the burden to never mess up, never make its characters look bad - to always get it right.

I want to see designers capitalize on a beauty that is not only white. I need them to stop acting like beautiful black and brown women do not exist.

I feel like being vocal on social media, especially working in an industry that is very Eurocentric.

When I was writing stories about Chinese American characters in my fiction classes, I'd get comments like, 'You should consider writing more universal stories.' But anything can happen to a Chinese American girl - just as much of the canon of English literature involves white men or women.

I believe that a lot of minority writers stress about whether they get pigeonholed in writing about identity stuff, like you can't write about other things.

I wholeheartedly believe that we can't organize just as women. There has to be specific messaging and an issue prioritization based on identity groups. Because when you ask a black woman what her top priority issues are versus a white woman versus a Muslim woman versus an undocumented woman, you're going to get... different answers.

Black people have to define who we are, or others do it for us.

Something that happens to me is that I'll write a play specifically from my own experience, and then I'll inevitably be told that I'm being tunnel-visioned about it. People always ask, 'What about that other race? Or discrimination toward those people?'

I don't want to exclusively direct white films, or black films. I want to have a choice.

I have to own the fact that I'm a black man - that's why I did 'Black Panther' and 'Widows' because if I play the industry game, I lose.

The only people I don't reach on a very personal level are straight white men. They don't really need another entertainer dedicated for them exclusively, so they're fine.

I don't want to take too much responsibility, where I'm like, 'Oh, I'm representing Asia.'

When I speak, I don't speak for myself; I don't have the luxury of a Caucasian to be able to speak for myself. I speak for a whole community, and I represent so many different communities that that felt like a lot of pressure.

It's fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility - this too is part of the work, is indeed central to [my photographs]... This invisibility - this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time - is the greatest source of my longing.

People want to call me racist for doing the Bon Qui Qui character, and I'm like, 'Look, Bon Qui Qui is a representation of a hood chick. That's it.' There are lots of hood chicks out there: some are black, some are Mexican, some are Salvadorian, and some are white.

Movies and TV are America's No. 1 export. So if our No. 1 export is all male, all white, then there's only one point of view. And I just think it's really important that as Americans - I'm a new American, but I am an American - that we don't portray ourselves to the world so one-sided and exclusive.