I'm not just gonna go after the black Jesse Jackson they all want to make fun of, but I know the wrong people are gonna laugh at that. I don't want to play to that crowd. I don't.
Black women fought for the right to vote during the suffrage movement and fought again during the civil rights movement. The rote narrative in the press of the civil rights movement is truncated with the briefest of histories of men like Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, or John Lewis.
I have worked hard to build relationships between Jewish people and black people.
I don't judge people by their sexual orientation or the color of their skin, so I find it really hard to identify someone by saying that they're a gay person or a black person or a Jewish person.
They say that every Jewish person is supposed to love one black person in his life. I'm glad Lorne Michaels chose me.
I think everybody has the ability to fall in love with a man or with a woman or a white person or a black person or a Jewish person or a Protestant person or whatever.
I remember as a young man seeing these bigger-than-life, strong images of black manhood in the form of Jim Brown and Fred Williamson, Jim Kelly, Billy Dee Williams. All these guys were these alpha males who were smart, attractive. I said, 'Wow, I want to be like that.'
Arthur Ashe had been the first black athlete to play Johannesburg at the time of apartheid.
Just wearing all black comes from Johnny Cash. I'm on the road so much that if I wear all black, my clothes never get dirty. You can't tell if I've worn the same shirt twice.
I'm like Johnny Cash. I only wear black.
When I was writing 'Black Panther,' on one level, I was angry because DC would never let me write 'Batman,' so I was doing Marvel's 'Batman,' and Reverend Achebe became sort of the Joker to Panther's Batman.
We did a black 'Julius Caesar' in which the predominant accent was Caribbean. This offends many people, you know. I also had a Chinese Marc Anthony. I also managed - this caused a great shock - I also got some white guys in it as well!
I was the only black girl at my junior high school. I had an afro, a Jamaican accent, I looked really old.
Starting in junior high school, through high school, I was very into metal or black metal and death metal specifically.
I've done movies for certain reasons; I did 'Anaconda' because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn't dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It's like, 'The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.'
To kids, I've always been more than just some big tough black guy. I train to be tough - I box and do karate - but underneath all that toughness is a tender man.
My dad worked with Mary Jackson very closely at one point. I knew Katherine Johnson as well. They were all part of this group of black engineers and scientists within this larger NASA community.
At screenings for 'Black in America,' I've heard people say, 'Well you know, I never thought you were black until you did Katrina, and then I thought you were black.'
I believe I can do it, but one of the reasons I don't really get into the debate is people keep talking about a black James Bond: how a black man should play him.
I visited an asylum to observe expressions of the mentally disturbed and to get my body language right for the blind girl's role. I visited the blind school, read the autobiography of Helen Keller, and watched a number of films from 'Scent of a Woman' to 'Anurag,' 'Fanaa' and 'Black.'
