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To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.

You know, I don't play the race card a lot. I'm half-black, half-white, and I'm proud of - my skin is brown. The world sees me as a black man, but my mother didn't raise me as a black man. She didn't raise me as a white guy.

The race is your face. Obviously, I come from a mixed background. Who I am and how I look and being black.

It's fascinating that people, there's so many people now who will make judgments based on what you look like. I'm black. So I'm supposed to think a certain way. I'm supposed to have certain opinions. I don't do that. You don't create a box and put people in and then make a lot of generalizations about them.

Traditionally, I have no right to talk about race. I'm white; I didn't grow up in an all-black neighborhood. But the license I see for myself is I'm a member of the world.

Once you open up the Pandora's box of race and gender... you're never done.

I don't understand labels. I don't need anybody to tell me I'm Latina or black or anything else. I've played characters that were written for Caucasian females, I just want to be given the same consideration as everybody else, and so far that has been happening.

Like, you can't tell a certain race, like, 'You're supposed to act this way, and you're not supposed to act this way because of what color you are,' like, that's just holding everybody back, you know what I'm saying?

I feel like I come from a smaller off shoot of black people because I am mixed. People say I'm African American but that doesn't include the other half of me.

We are not post-racial. And in many ways we don't even know how to have a conversation about being post-racial. Until we get out of that old-school way of thinking about race and opportunity and the ability to transcend some of the past of this country, then we're going to be stuck in the 20th-century conversation about race.