Amanda Seales Quotes

There are a lot of stereotypes to be broken which I think a lot of us are doing. What I do is, as soon as people try to pin me down to one kind of part, I'll play a very different kind of role, so it explodes that stereotype.

Paul Robeson was an athlete, Rutgers valedictorian, lawyer, writer, actor in movies and plays, great voice - a black male doing it all, back when some people thought he shouldn't. One reason I do all the things I do is to break stereotypes that people can only do certain things.

I often wonder whether Negroes like myself who are pretty well known help out at all in breaking down barriers.

A show hosted by a black had never been accepted, so the first time that knob's turned on, people are judging against all they have ever been taught. I may have been the first black in the house.

I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo. The next time a woman runs, or a black, a Jew, or anyone from a group that the country is 'not ready' to elect to its highest office, I believe that he or she will be taken seriously from the start.

I want to continue to broaden expectations of what an Asian can be.

Right now, black female artists are the most interesting people to think about. People are ready to hear whatever we're gonna say, and I'm not scared to say anything.

'2 Dope Queens,' it was just a way for us to showcase female comedians, showcase comedians of color, showcase LGBT comedians, and shake up the landscape and be like, 'Hey, there is more than just what is out there.'

I sort of feel like that's the most revolutionary thing we can do with our narrative for me as Black people is to show that we are just like you.

Part of the concept behind the magazine was breaking barriers. And it wasn't just a sexual thing. It was racial and doing the things that were right. And in the process, that set 'Playboy' apart.

I never consider myself a minority. I see people who look like me in Barbados, in Trinidad, in Haiti, in London, and in Brooklyn. So I don't know what the heck anyone means when they call me a 'minority.' There's something about that word to me. It just minimalizes people.

People look to 'Dear White People' as an encyclopedia of our culture. But it's also art, and there are characters with different perspectives.

I have lots of hopes for black actors in general, whether they be on TV or on stage or in movies, and that is that we move beyond the tokenism of what it means to be black in a particular set of circumstances.

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

There was the 'Cosby Show' in America in the 1980s, which was a doctor in a beautiful Brownstone middle-class house. We just haven't created a role like that in the U.K.; it's always gangs and crime. We need to be brave.

With 'Broadcast News,' it became a non-issue, and with 'The Piano,' it became a non-issue. Both parts were written for more statuesque women. It was nice to change people's minds about that, because that's neither here nor there.

During the era when women were burning their bras - which, by the way, they never actually did - but when women were first becoming liberated, I was 23. And I met a woman who asked, 'Don't you feel bad because you're sort of acting like the stupid airhead blonde?' And I totally surprised myself. I said, 'Liberation can also come from the inside.'

It's important to me for the world to see black men in different capacities - capacities in which they're probably not used to seeing them.

I think that black people making art, women making art, and certainly black women making art is a disruptive endeavor - and it's one that I enjoy extremely.

Obama's presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he'd awakened about American identity.

I am not merely a baseball player. I am a black man who has done what he wants, gotten what he wanted, and will continue to get it.

Cinema has the power to change the society. Through my films, the kind of characters I have played and will play, I am trying to do my bit in changing the patriarchal mindset.

I'm sure when alternative comedy started, before which - Billy Connolly aside - standup was essentially a person being racist and sexist onstage, there was also the sense that this was the death of comedy. But it's just progress.

I like crossing the imaginary boundaries people set up between different fields - it's very refreshing.