I have my great grandmother's recipe for black beans, all the way from Cuba, and I know how to make those. I'm actually pretty good at it now. But my first time, the beans actually exploded in the pot, so I had black beans just dripping from the ceiling - which is actually a dream come true for most Cubans. It was a nightmare to clean.
I can remember, as a child, the happy days of us all piling into the car and going to the drive-in. And that was a weekly routine for my father. He was a proud black man, and that all sort of vanished as America began to export jobs.
The black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.
What I find is that you don't need to go for fancy mascara - I always get the L'Oreal ones from the drugstore. I get the gold tube, Voluminous Million Lashes in black.
And, well of course, Count Basie, and I think all of the black bands of the late thirties and early forties, bands with real players. They had an influence on everybody, not just drummers.
There was always music in our home. My mom and my dad loved music. I remember when we were kids we would have these great parties at the house with congas and bongos and African drums, and it was amazing. It wasn't until years later that I found out that they were actually Black Panther meetings.
If you're a young black dude from the hood you want to come through the hood in a car that makes a lot of noise.
The clothes chosen for me as a child had a strong element of the Pre-Raphaelite, muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black.
We were constantly appealing for funds from readers when I edited 'The Black Dwarf' in 1968-69.
I can't have brown hair for some reason. I don't think it goes with my skin tone. The second I see it turn brown in the sun, I dye it black - the blacker the better.
Seventh grade was the first time I dyed my hair, and I went to school with red and black stripes, so I looked like a zebra.
To see someone 70 years old with dyed black hair, you're like, 'Hmmm, I dunno. Is that a wrinkled teenager? What is that?' So at some point, I'm going to have to stop doing this. It's gonna look ridiculous. I don't wanna look like Elvis Presley at 60 years old.
At fashion shows, my brows often get bleached, and they've been dyed back much darker - like jet black, where you can't even see my skin. Sometimes with Just for Men! What a mistake. At times, the two brows aren't even the same color!
I don't want to be the guy who's 50-something years old sitting in front of a microphone with my beard dyed black and my hat on backwards, yo-yo-yoing.
Before me, everything was black or navy blue or gray or brown or beige, things like that, for daytime. I began using shocking pink and ice blue and all kinds of bright colors. And I dyed furs.
I am a black British female artist, so I must be like Ms Dynamite, I must be like Shystie, I must be like Jamelia, but we're all different.
Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time.
I think my wife saw a picture of the rock group Journey, and they're kind of aging, and the one guy had dyed blonde hair with black roots, and... my idea was to get a little earring, I wanted to have a dangling earring.
First, you have stereotypes, and that will be the black drug dealer, the east Asian kung fu master, the Middle Eastern terrorist in 'True Lies.' Then you have stuff that takes place on culturally specific terrain, that engages with it, but actually subverts assumptions. 'Smashes' stereotypes. That's where I've come into the game.
I'm a black lady from the Lower East Side of New York. Not a lot intimidates me.
