Cheo Hodari Coker Quotes

I think, as a black man, I have a responsibility to have knowledge and have an opinion.

There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.

I don't mind being black. I'm black out loud. It's more than the people that they are, it's the condition that they represent.

I am so used to having two faces. A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face.

Even the humble black grandmother, who sings in the church choir and struggles to raise a grandchild abandoned to her care, must assert ideological liberalism in order to make others comfortable about her blackness.

I'm fully conscious all the time that I'm an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, 'I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.'

By the time I reached middle school, I fully identified myself not even as biracial but just as black.

I'd never been around or seen a black showrunner, and in some ways you wish that it wasn't a big deal.

As a black person, I'm used to going to places in which I might be the only black person that shows up there. This experience has an effect on the way you see yourself in the world and what it means to be black in the world.

I have to own the fact that I'm a black man - that's why I did 'Black Panther' and 'Widows' because if I play the industry game, I lose.

I think there's a lot of things that occur within the African-American community, that we would prefer to stay within the African-American community - that we get a little nervous when you start having scenes or dialogue that we know is going to be viewed and heard on a national or global scale.

What I really hoped to do with my work was to at least be able to define my relationship to race.

We understand 'Roots,' and that experience was mind-boggling, and it changed the way society viewed race relations. It was incredibly important. With 'Roots,' I was just as proud as anybody else that people of color were getting their stories told.

I don't see a white woman. I see a black woman, even though my mother is white. Knowing that has made my life easier, I think.

Growing up in London, with a hippie mom, I don't know that I'm most people's definition of what a black person is. I'm mixed, yes, but in the world I'm defined as black before I'm defined white. I've never been called white.

There are so many people who have this idea of who I am because I'm black.

If faux liberal white guys want to support and defend Obama, by all means please do so. But I would suggest they try to limit that support to matters of policy and not perspectives on race.

Overall my race hasn't been a problem. I'm a Black artist with White skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what's in your own soul.

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.

One must learn how to be black in America.

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

I am struck by how, walking down the street, I'm rarely made aware of my race, but that among journalists, race is absolutely massive.

I never learned how to be adequately black. I never learned how to be black at all.

I've heard that I've gotten a lighter complexion, as if I've bleached my skin. I think that is so stupid and ludicrous. For those who want to bleach their skin, that's fine. I just didn't bleach mine. I'm a black woman. I don't want to be anything but a black woman.

You never want to be the whitest-sounding black guy in a room.