Kelela Quotes

In my experience, as a young black artist, you have to fulfill an archetype, or be a token - and I was unwilling to do that.

It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.

We're told that independent film lovers... folks that are used to watching art house films, won't come out and see a film with black people in it - I've been told that in rooms, big rooms, studio rooms, and I know that's not true.

Each one of my movies is going to be about one of these different social demons. The first one, being 'Get Out,' is about race and neglect and marginalization.

Hollywood had a history of whitewashing and not representing.

People always say, 'There are plenty of black country artists out there! There is Charley Pride! Darius Rucker!' That's all they can name. They don't understand what we go through, and a lot of people who are fans of traditional country music, as they call it, look at us and aren't going to say, 'Y'all like country music.'

I've been asked far too often, 'Can you be blacker?' I've gotten done with auditions and heard, 'We're not going to go black with this character.'

Especially when you're queer and you're a person of color, you're so used to being the token on set. Inevitably you have to answer dumb questions from someone. You're the 'other.'

I feel like I'm put in a position where I have to engage with what people bring to my work, which is an expectation for me to talk about race because it's not normal for a black writer to be writing in the theatre.

Black artists are encouraged to explore their identity but are then pigeonholed according to their ethnicity. We may have seen the decline of old racism, but we are witnessing a new kind of racialising.

Many of us actively working to interrupt racism continually hear complaints about the 'gotcha' culture of white anti-racism. There is a stereotype that we are looking for every incident we can find so we can spring out, point our fingers, and shout, 'You're a racist!'

While the documentary community is way ahead of Hollywood, it is still nowhere near where it needs to be. Filmmakers of color rarely get hired by the powerful production companies, and they are not getting supported enough by broadcasters and funders to tell their own stories.

I had a casting director tell me to be blacker.

I didn't want to write a 'black' book because black characters are a tough sell.

I am an African-American woman of dark skin tone, and there are very specific roles that are usually given to African-American women of a darker hue. Let's start with 'Once on This Island': peasant girl. Let's go to 'The Color Purple': young girl, beaten. Let's go to 'Ragtime': Her baby's taken.

That's the nightmare for Elizabeth Warren, because I can attack her from the left. I can say, 'Wait a minute, what do you know about the journey of a person of color? You know nothing. This is all theory to you. Because you did lie. You took advantage of affirmative action.'

And I feel like, as a black man within black culture, I know very well firsthand - as do my parents and my grandparents and great-grandparents - we're used to things not going our way.

The reason why 'Black Lives Matter' is a chant is because a lot of people feel, myself included, that sometimes they don't matter.

Some things you never really fully understand unless you are actually black and you experience how it feels when someone treats you differently based on your skin colour.

Our internal racism is still alive. We are still putting each other down and making jokes about each other because of the color of our skin. With women particularly, it's difficult because the beauty business says, 'If you don't look a certain way, God made a mistake.'

Hillbilly stereotypes have always made it easier for middle-class whites to presume that racism is the exclusive province of 'that kind' of person.

It's important to understand you can't remove the historical context of racially charged stereotypes or slurs as much as we like to pretend that we can.

Self-censorship is the most devastating thing for an artist.

The only real thing I took away from the military is that it just reinforced all the things I already thought about the underbelly of America, like how racist it is. So, it didn't really affect my music literally, but it affected the way I work on it.

We keep racism alive. We pass it on to our children. I think that is very sad.