Madonna's like a black widow spider. She tends to use people, then they shrivel up and disappear.
When a sports movie really works, it gets you on all levels, because the stakes are high. It's black and white. It's win or lose.
In Windsor in the forties, and even up into the fifties and sixties, if you were black, you had to sit in the balcony of the theatres, and you couldn't buy property in most places.
The nurses' job is emotional and distressing. Their day-to-day work is dealing with people withering and falling to pieces. So black humour is essential for them cope with that. It's just a consequence of their environment.
And then I went to visit my sister in the states and all of a sudden it was just like, it's like... it's like the movie Wizard of Oz when all of a sudden it changes from Black and White to glorious Technicolor.
Black Lives Matter started from a post that I put on Facebook after the acquittal of George Zimmerman. I woke up in the middle of the night sobbing, just trying to process what had happened and wanting to find community around being in a lot of grief and having a lot of rage.
As it pertains to my black womanhood, there's just a lot of ground to cover. There's a lot of stuff to say.
There's something very important about films about black women and girls being made by black women. It's a reflection as opposed to an interpretation.
We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'
About the time I was 7, I got really into black-exploitation films, so I made my own Wonder Woman, but I made her black.
In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.
Black people have been working hard for decades.
The working-class black Southern Christian culture I come from still nurtures me, and I mean directly, daily.
There are certain tuxes you can get away with a black tie, but with others, you'd be dishonoring the workmanship if you didn't wear a full bow tie.
As a very young writer - kindergarten through about fifth grade - I most often wrote about black characters. My very early stories were science fiction and fantasy, with kids stowing away on spaceships and a girl named Tilly who was trying to get into the 'Guinness Book of World Records.'
'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me.
What 'jazz' means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term 'jazz' has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians.
Non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia can only celebrate Valentine's Day behind closed doors. Apparently, this has led to a huge black market for flowers and wrapping paper.
I'm dark-skinned. When I'm around black people, I'm made to feel 'other' because I'm dark-skinned. I've had to wrestle with that, with people going, 'You're too black.' Then I come to America, and they say, 'You're not black enough.'
We all have these challenges and stereotypes that exist, but you can't let that hold you down... If that's the first thing you think about as a black woman - the challenge that lies ahead - you are thinking in the wrong direction, in my opinion.
