Ava DuVernay Quotes

I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.

Martin Luther King Jr., a fraud and degenerate in his life, has become the symbol and cynosure of White Dispossession and the deconstruction of Occidental civilization. We must overcome!

I started to think of 'Hidden Figures' as the first part of a mid-century African-American trilogy.

From jazz, the blues, country and rock to Hollywood movies, culture has in many ways been our greatest export (or our most obnoxious one, depending on your point of view).

I admire people who have fought for change: Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln. I'm dead serious when I say that - those are my heroes. I also like Ben Affleck.

I feel like being vocal on social media, especially working in an industry that is very Eurocentric.

I always say it's hard to cast an African-American film sometimes because those kinds of actors just aren't out there.

The name James Baldwin had been around the house for as long as I could remember and meant almost as much as that of Martin Luther King.

Being a Filipino actor in Hollywood, the most frustrating part of landing roles in Hollywood is definitely the limited roles available and the lack of diversity.

I think, overall, there is a lack of diversity in the arts. I'm thinking about when I was in grad school: I could probably count on one hand the number of minority students in the graduate school program.

The Asian woman in Hollywood movies has usually been one of two extremes - totally submissive or totally ruthless. In either case her primary function has been decorative.

To put it simply, as a black man, I started watching films at the age of six, and I've since seen the bad guys changing race - between the African savages, to the Native Americans, and then the blacks and the Arabs and the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Look at 'Rambo': it's exactly that.

I think that sometimes we put undue pressure on stories featuring people of color, and I hope we get to a point where it's not such a rarity to see a person of color be the hero of a story, so that it can just be a story and not have to carry so much weight.

Martin Luther King can have his own self-titled birthday recognized as a national holiday, but not our country's first president?

Why aren't there films being made that tell ethnically diverse stories? Or why is it so impossible to allow a person of color to add their texture and their essence to a role that is not ethnically specific? I don't know why it's a novel or risky idea to consider making a film look like how our world actually looks today.

The tradition has always been that in Roman films, the Romans are always British, and it's usually posh British: Laurence Olivier and his ilk. My take on all this was that it's a metaphor for empire and the end of empire.

Let's face it: there aren't a lot of black superheroes. So, in dealing with a black superhero, you're going to deal with ugly history and the beauty of history.

When films are so hero centric, and directors are dancing to the tunes of the hero, where is the Kannada voice or song?

Fashion week is not an episode of 'Girls' or 'Friends,' where I'm OK that there is not a black person in sight because I honestly believe these characters don't come into contact with - therefore don't have - any black friends. No, in the case of Fashion week, it feels wrong.

Until black culture as a whole is effectively disentangled from the python-grip of hip-hop, and by extension the street, we are not going to see any real progress.

I think the stakes are always high when you're an artist of color - to get things right, to get things perfect and make everybody happy.

I remember distinctly not seeing myself. I didn't see myself in black culture, white culture, mass culture.

I've built a career in Asia for 18 years, playing roles that had nothing to do with my race because everybody's Chinese in the films.

If our culture is so often readily and easily appropriated, imagine what happens when we embrace our full blackness and know that our contributions are just as important to the shaping of the country and, more broadly, the world.

There isn't only one way that black art or entertainment is represented, and that's the most important thing. We're permeating every style. We're claiming and, when necessary, appropriating all kinds of forms. Nothing is forbidden, because it's not what black people do: because it's not what we think of as black art.