Ruby Dee Quotes

The movies 'Dope' and 'Straight Outta Compton' blew me away. I love seeing directors and writers of color make amazing slices of pop culture.

One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition.

Spike Lee is part of a retrograde movement in this country.

We've all been influenced by American naturalism, and to ignore that entirely would be impossible for me as someone who works primarily in film.

I love telling the experience of a black male in America, but modern, not always having to go back to a period piece to remind people where we come from. It's more a modern sense of where we are today and where we want to go in the future. So I try to choose projects somewhere around that space.

Black filmmakers - I'm grateful for them.

I think that's what's so great about 'Jessica James' is you get to sit back and take a moment and realize that this person is black. And some days, this character wakes up and feels black, and some days, she doesn't. That is, for me, a fully black experience.

I think a lot of black filmmakers have done very well.

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.

In my opinion, Spike Lee is a national cultural treasure - to the black community in particular but to America in general.

Many times, I get young people asking, 'What do you think about black movies?' And I say, 'What are you talking about? You mean Hollywood movies that have black people in them?' It's gone back to that, and that's not the same thing as a black movie.

A lot of the things I do deal with my race, but my race is who I am. I'm an American kid who grew up listening to predominantly hip-hop. I will talk about hip-hop as the music I grew up listening to, and I think sometimes people like to put it as, 'Oh, well, he's talking about black things.' And, yeah, they are, but that's my American identity.

And as a young black man, a lot of my professors would really think that it was useful to see the work of politically oriented, positivistic, leftist creative works. And I found it incredibly useful. And I found it something that I've learned from and gained from.

The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans. I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.

We[with Jordan Peele] wanted to do something with [Barack] Obama because we actually felt that Obama was kind of responsible for us even getting a show in the first place because there's this biracial person who might, you know, have to ride the divide between two different races.

But black folks have never really been optimists. We've been prisoners of hope, and hope is qualitatively different from optimism in the way that there's a difference between The Blues and Lawrence Welk. The Blues and Jazz have to do with hope while the other is sugarcoated music which has to do with sentimental optimism.

Toni Morrison is challenged regularly because she is a black author who writes about the real world. She speaks with so much knowledge about black issues she can't be accused of creating these (issues). People find these issues threatening.

Well technologically and so forth, it's a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it's very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content.

I think that we've got to come to see this. The Negro is an American.

One of the defining characteristics or difference between today's illegal immigration and the immigration of old is the immigrants of the late 1800s through the early 1920s came here desiring to become Americans. They wanted to become part of what was a unique and distinct American culture. They were all coming from tyranny of one kind or another.

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again." How It Feels to Be Colored Me

When you're a black superhero you can't erase the notion that you're black.

Somebody once said to me after I'd done "Deep Impact," "What is it like to play a Black president," and I said, "I didn't play a Black president. I played a president. I just happened to be Black. There's a difference.