Kerry James Marshall Quotes

If a casting breakdown said 'All-American Type' or 'Lead Role,' I knew they weren't thinking of me.

Growing up, usually when I saw a black female on television, she was either a broken character or sidekick.

The sad reality of it is, as black artists in the industry, we still have to work 10 times harder to get our voices out there.

At the time that they were shown, the Brillo Boxes were underappreciated. It's only now, with the patina of history, that we can really see these masterpieces in a clear light.

Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men's stories about wars, business, power.

A genocide in Africa has not received the same attention that genocide in Europe or genocide in Turkey or genocide in other part of the world. There is still this kind of basic discrimination against the African people and the African problems.

Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return. The white man's God cannot love our people, or He would protect them.

It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'

It's emotional for artists who are women and people of color to have less value placed on our worldview.

When I was a little girl, there was no Variety Latino. When I was a little girl, there was no nothing. There were very few roles for people like myself.

When you're a large black man in Hollywood, the obvious stereotype is one of force and menace.

The color and the diversity dies out, and it gets whiter and whiter, and that's in any field. There is also this idea that there can only be one gay person or there can only be one Asian-American woman in the office, and so it also perpetuates itself where we are isolated, especially the more successful we get.

In television and the movie business, the people who are promoted and the people who are mentored always look like the white guys.

I grew up under the politics of my size and my skin. I grew up under the politics of the sound of my voice and a lack of agency, or a feeling of a lack of agency, and not always being able to find myself in images that were in the media.

Literature has been a treacherous site for black Americans because literary production has been so tied with the project of proving our humanity through the act of writing.

If we talk about art in general... all the works of art, each one of them could reflect a moment in the history of mankind, the time in which it was created.

Young Black actresses were not necessarily given the space in Hollywood to fully see ourselves.

The history of country music is as important as any other art form.

Any comedic roles that I've gone out for usually end up going to a white woman or a gay man instead.

If you were to turn on the TV in 1986, '87, you wouldn't see anybody having, I guess, a low-to-middle-income person of color experience. And you definitely wouldn't have a young LGBT person or their story told. The experience of being invisible in our culture has ramifications that I don't think any of us can really understand.

It's very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don't make portraiture ideological in some way.

I was a mixed black girl existing in a westernized Hawaiian culture where petite Asian women were the ideal, in a white culture where black women were furthest from the standard of beauty, in an American culture where trans women of color were invisible.

The first impression and a natural one is, that the fine arts have risen or declined in proportion as patronage has been given to them or withdrawn, but it will be found that there has often been more money lavished on them in their worst periods than in their best, and that the highest honours have frequently been bestowed on artists whose names are scarcely now known.

I think media are at their most interesting before anybody's thought of calling them art, when people still think they're just a load of junk.

I am not an American; I am one of twenty-two million black people who are victims of Americanism.