August Wilson Quotes

Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics.

It really upsets me that the media insists on turning 'Do the Right Thing' or 'Boyz N the Hood' into 'black films.' They are American films. They may open the window on the black experience, but they had things to say to everybody. That's why they were so successful.

When I see the black experience - there's not one, but it is specific, and you can't ignore it.

There is, for me, as a black woman, as an African woman, a sense of possibility in America that I don't feel when I'm in Europe.

I don't think there is enough understanding of how diverse black America actually is.

NWA was all-American; Wu-Tang was all-American. It was just a part of America you may not have seen at the time.

I love being an American, and it's a beautiful country, but we are a bunch of whack jobs. We have got so much to learn.

Hip-hop has always been speaking about the way your brain is manipulated by stress and struggle because hip-hop is borne from struggle.

If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.

Old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

I am a Canadian, a man and a Black man in that order.

Slavery was our original sin. Race, our continuing dilemma.

The black world squirms beneath the feet of the white in impotent fury or sullen hate.

Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York. He says well, they are coming along, and that, after all, they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart. My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years. I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have been, frankly, inbred.

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

There is no such thing as talking about class without there being implications of the racial history of the United States. You just can't do it.

I think being biracial is a different experience. I think that, and coming from the U.K., I feel as much white as I do black. And so it's really important for me to address these issues of identity in my work. But also, you know, we're always stronger when we work on, you know, what we have in common. And I love exploring that in my work.

The only part of my mother's experience that still gets to me is the way she and people like her were looked down upon for asking America to be America, for asking for full and equal participation in our democracy.

Stories about race and identity pique my interest for obvious reasons. That's in my body, my brain, my history, my memories - it's all part of my toolbox as an actor.

Well, when you think about it black American culture evolved over three and a half centuries. Every minute under which they lived under oppression and they adapted to dealing with the fact that those freedoms were going to be cut off. They had to somehow make a life within all of those restriction, and they did.

I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother's employer's family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home.

Part of my mission as an actor has been to define what an American is.

The great fact of individual difference and variability (that is, inequality) is evident from the long record of human experience: hence, the general recognition of the antihuman nature of a world of coerced uniformity.

The truth of the matter is, I am a black woman, and I am an actor. I don't try to get caught up in being a black actor; I'm just an actor who is a black woman. It's not about forgetting that you're black, but you don't need to be hammered over the head, either; it just is what it is.

I'd rather have dinner with Don King than with Mark Furhman. But then, I'm American. I have no perspective.