Barry Jenkins Quotes

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

I grew up poor, black, and working class.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

I used to be obsessed with race. I'm more obsessed with class now.

America is a country that would rather talk about race than class.

I wish black people had a flag they could put into the ground, like when the troops stormed Iwo Jima.

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

I'm an African American.

It's more dangerous to be black in America...If you are a normal white American, the truth is you don't understand being black in America, and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk in a way that you have to be corrected.

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?

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

We are still a nation deeply divided by race and class.

I am constantly accused of being 'First World.' So what should I do? I can't apologise for my environment, upbringing, aesthetic.

White male privilege remains alive in America, but the phrase would seem odd, if not infuriating, to a sixty-year-old man working as a Walmart greeter in southern Ohio.

Part of what our problem as blacks in America is that we don't claim that. Partly, you see, because of the linguistic environment in which we live.

I spent my life navigating systems built upon me - a black child in America - not making it out.

There's an anecdote that's really been sticking with me: To be a Black man in America, you are born into the horror genre. You are not safe. Period. Full stop.

My family is Jamaican. We were just the slaves that were dropped off over there. And at the end of the day when you live and exist as a Black person in America, at least to white society, to a certain extent, no one is asking where you're from and where you were born.

Sports - especially the NBA - function as a place where American society pretends to discuss and pretends to solve questions and historical agonies that can't possibly be solved within the realm of sports.

Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes: the mucky-mucks and the folk.

And so class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world.

If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.

More important than anything else is for Americans to wise up to class warfare demagoguery and reject the politics of envy.

The Government is responsible for what is happening to black people in America.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.