Walter Mosley Quotes

There was all this talk when Obama got elected about how we were living in a postracial world. But we're not. Until we get to the point where James Earl Jones can play, say, George Washington, race matters. You wouldn't put a white actor in blackface to play Othello. You shouldn't have a white actor in what amounts to yellowface to play Asian.

If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up sitting in prison. But desecrate an Indian grave, and you get a Ph.D.

You know, I'm an African-American quarterback. That may scare a lot of people because they - they haven't seen nothing that they can compare me to.

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 wanted to make a black story about South Africa. Unfortunately, no producer in the United States would put one penny into a black story.

I know that in the battle of ideas, Republican politicians are at a distinct disadvantage. Their fundamental philosophy - which I characterize as survival of the fittest, richest and whitest - is too callous for most Americans.

As an African-American actor, a lot of our stories haven't been told.

I don't think there's enough breadth to the stories told about African-Americans.

All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.

There are many projects I couldn't get off the ground because they didn't have white heroes. It's a problem that everyone who's been working in Hollywood has been facing.

It's very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you're the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You'd get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed.

I joke that a person of color would never make a movie like 'Midnight in Paris.' Nostalgia isn't so enticing.

There's already been black presidents who've been corrupt, so it doesn't strike me that having a black man in office means he's going to be the Messiah.

When you go back to 'Friends,' and you look at that as New York, there's no black people. That's not real. You're in New York City, and there's no black people at all. That's a little funny.

Here's the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it's put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don't call them a white film. I'm trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.

It is frustrating to be a Black woman in the entertainment industry.

Now we already know that the white supremacist Western scholars are going to object and oppose any evidence that shows an Afrikan influence on Greek civilization, or any other part of Europe. Their basic premise is to give Afrikan people credit for nothing

American popular culture has long been marked by an absence of empathy for American Indians. Westerns doubled as a campaign against so-called savages in a way that desensitized us to the savages we'd become.

I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows - except us - that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.

Early on, I played a Chinese delivery person, and even that, which was very innocuous, felt like I was somehow betraying myself. I felt very self-conscious on set doing that role, with a crew that was almost entirely white.

Without mentioning any names, there was a film that was being done, and I ran into the producer on the plane. It was a book that I really, really loved, and I said, 'I'd love to be a part of this.' And they made it clear that that was not going to be possible - for no particular reason other than that there was just no part for a black person.

The truth of the matter is, there were shows that depicted black characters that were on in the '90s, and they gave everybody a glimpse into the black experience. And then they disappeared.

People in Hollywood go home to their wives and children who look like they do. If you're in that position, your natural thought pattern is sometimes to think, 'Superman, oh yeah he's white.' You can't get mad at somebody for doing that. It's the world they live in and for some, they only live in that bubble.

Even the 'Negro' shows like 'Amos and Andy' and 'Beulah' are written largely by white writers - the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine.

There was such hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument. It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion that old-time music was the inheritance of white America.