Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky.
The casualties in the Civil War amount to more than all other wars - all other American wars combined. More people died in that war than World War II, World War I, Vietnam, etc. And that was a war for white supremacy. It was a war to erect a state in which the basis of it was the enslavement of black people.
My dad has totally taken my Cat Stevens T-shirt, but it's OK; I have his Black Flag one, and that's amazing.
We struck an unusual deal. I'll get to leave CNN with my catalog and documentaries. We were able to create a brand at CNN - 'Black in America' - that I now own. I can take that brand and extend it in any way I want.
Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.
My first film goes into production in October. It's called White Boy Shuffle and it's based on a novel about a young black kid and it's sort of reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye.
Now that the black experience isn't viewed as box-office death, people are catching up to untapped auteurs.
I loved pop music as a little kid. Things like the Black Eyed Peas. If it had a catchy chorus, I was into it.
Here's the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it's put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don't call them a white film. I'm trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.
We're not thought of in terms of color because we are entertainers. We are there to entertain you not because we are black, white, pink, or green or gay or straight or because we are Catholic or Protestant.
When I started modeling, they tried to pay black models less than they paid Caucasian models. I turned down those jobs because I knew what I was worth.
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.
I grew up in a largely black community during the '70s and '80s that scoffed at 'white' music. That music - folk, rock, some disco - was considered soulless, aberrant, just one more example of the Caucasian's desire to scream and yell and demand whatever their privilege and perpetual adolescence dictated they should demand.
Seattle is still more Caucasian than most medium-sized cities. The sort of psychosexual politics of white fandom in context of black athletes who are also both very rich and slightly angry is just, to me, bottomlessly fascinating.
God is on my side, and that's all I need. I get up in the morning, I pray to God. I don't pray to the president, the governor, the mayor, no black caucus, no this and that. I pray to God, and that's the end of it.
If it weren't for the likes of Sharpton, Jackson, the Congressional Black Caucus, Barack Obama, and the NAACP, racial strife in America would be a distant memory.
When I arrived to study at Oxford in October 1963, the bohemian style was black plastic or leather jackets for women and black leather or navy donkey jackets for men. I stuck to cavalry twills and a duffle coat, at least for a few months.
I've never watched a race live from Ascot. I used to make sure I didn't miss Black Caviar run, but that wasn't at Ascot.
I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, so in Iowa, we didn't have a pro sports team, so it was all about the Hawks, and everybody was a Hawkeyes fan, and everybody had their black and gold and had something Hawkeye related.
Black girls are punished, many times violently so, for questioning and challenging authority, which is something that is often celebrated and encouraged as a sign of intelligence and critical thinking in white boys.
