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I mean, there's plenty of artists who are making R&B music, but because of their ethnicity, it's considered something else.

People just decided I was an R&B artist because I'm black.

It's crazy how a whole lot of African artists work. Big respect to everyone that does it, but I have not heard anything that really cuts across. We're trying to do that.

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

We throw at female artists this expectation that their work has to speak to the female experience. And if it doesn't, you're letting the side down. Throwing this stumbling block in the way of female artists is counterintuitive.

I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.

Artists should be free to create what we want. I believe there's a special value in work that is a reflection of oneself as opposed to interpretation. When I see a film or a TV show about black people not written by someone who's black, it's an interpretation of that life.

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.'

In my experience, as a young black artist, you have to fulfill an archetype, or be a token - and I was unwilling to do that.