India Arie Quotes

Mr. Cosby wanted to do a show not about an upper-middle-class black family, but an upper-middle-class family that happened to be black. Though it sounds like semantics, they're very different approaches.

In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it's as if they don't exist.

I started to watch 'Play for Today' and plays like 'Cathy Come Home,' and Kenneth Branagh's 'Billy' trilogy in the 1980s, which took us into the world of the Belfast family. As a kid in Luton, how was I ever going to know that world otherwise?

For me, whenever I would see a lot of 'black films,' I didn't feel represented in it. I didn't feel connected to the characters or the situations or the humor.

Funny enough though, despite what Donald Trump has to say and the way African-American people are portrayed so often in media, African-American people can have a leaning to be very conservative.

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.

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.

As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island,' or 'Hamlet' and look beyond the specifics of it - whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person - to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me.

Most of my friends, growing up, were upper-middle-class white kids, so it was a different reality at home both culturally and linguistically. It created a lot of insecurities for me, but it also did a lot of amazing things that I didn't know were happening at the time.

My 'Black Panther' run really wasn't about Black Panther. It was about Ross. It was about exploding myths about black superheroes, black characters, and black people, targeted specifically at a white, male-dominated retailer base.

Just because we finally have a Latino family on TV doesn't mean we're up there to lecture people about what it means to be Latino.

In Maryland, I didn't grow up around poor white people. Where I grew up, the white people were middle class or upper-middle class. It's interesting how screwed up it is in reality, because most people who receive assistance from the government are white, but not in my head or in my experience.

I wish that positions of power dependent on education were as open to abused children, poor children, working-class children as they are to the children of the rich and successful. I really wish that were true.

I come from a well-educated and cultured, middle-class Maharashtrian family and have been brought up with social awareness.

In the public, it seems to be painted that when minorities get pregnant, they need to get abortions, especially when it comes to teen pregnancy. It's like, when black girls are pregnant, it's like a statistic, but when white girls get pregnant, they get a TV show.

There were no small brown kids as the centre of the children's fiction I grew up with.

I had a niche. And my niche was that I was brown. So it's like, 'Great, I get to go up for all these 'brown parts.'' I call them 'brown parts' because that's what they are. That's not to be resentful, because I loved playing those parts - I got to meet so many cool actors.

Discounting the ineffably repetitive homophobic barbs that I receive most days, Twitter trolls' most common gripe against me appears to be that I am 'posh.' Contrary to their unshakeable view, I was not born into the upstairs world.

Until 'Moonlight,' I had never seen one black man cook for another on screen. But I wanted the characters to be free of 'groundbreaking' or 'never before.' We were ascribed those things. They weren't the point.

It's people who look like me, just seeing representation of everyone. I didn't get that when I was young. I only saw one black girl that was on a Disney show, that was known for being the sassy, coocoo, that type of girl.

You turn 'Insecure' on, and you see a sea of brown. You see at the core of it a strong friendship between two brown-skinned girls.

My experience is that white kids love hip-hop, and brown and black kids love rock music. That shows that brown kids - they carry emotion, they carry pain, they carry oppression and strife.

In the publishing sense, 'urban fantasy' does not mean 'black,' and that's pretty ironic, considering that it's a euphemism everywhere else. It would be great to get that back.

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.

My work is often a therapy for myself - a working out of these issues as a black woman. And a way of allowing other black women to work through this kind of stigmatization as they look through the images and feel how distorted or contorted they might be in the public eye.