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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I come out of the box, I don't come out of the box as racial.
One must learn how to be black in America.
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.
The less I talk about being black, the better.
I believe that the American audience is not so dumb that they wouldn't be interested in a black story.
A lot of times black actors get stuck in a box. They're up against a lot of limitations for the kind of films that they get approached about. It's easy to get stuck in a box and just be approached about nothing but urban films.
I write the black experience in America, and contained within that experience, because it is a human experience, are all the universalities.
The thing about being black and having a different accent, in the beginning, is that it makes you foreign.
Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're 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.